AI Program Mentor (Fall 2024)

AI Program Mentor (remote, part-time, evening hours)

Do you remember that person who made you realize your true potential?

The one who championed you while you traversed the path towards academic or professional success.

Your mentor. Maybe you had one, or even several, if you were very lucky!

Do you want to be that mentor to younger students? Do you have computer science experience and expertise? Are you interested in learning and teaching about AI gen AI, LLMs?

Yes, yes and yes? Great! We have an amazing opportunity for you!

This fall SureStart is partnering with the XCL World Academy to host a cutting-edge artificial intelligence-focused curriculum designed for Grade 6 students. Join SureStart and XCL this fall to be part of the first-ever Ethical AI program for 6th grade students!

This program runs from September 2024 through January 2025 and will teach skills related to AI, Gen AI, app development, innovation and entrepreneurship through a virtual program led by mentors.

We would love to have YOU as a mentor to help these grade 6 students learn AI and app development skills while you also get the chance to be trained in MIT's AppInventor platform --- all while getting paid for your efforts.

Program Specifics:
As a Program Mentor you will coach students through a 5 month program, providing guidance and advice. 

Location: Virtual (program sessions will be conducted over Zoom or similar platform)

Duration: Sept 2024 - Jan 2025; training in July/Aug 2024 (TBD)

Schedule: Part-time, approx. 3-5hrs/week in the evenings.

As a mentor, your responsibilities will be to:

• Train, support and encourage a small group of six 6th grade students as they develop knowledge of AI/Gen AI, App development, AI ethics, and AI-driven Innovation and Entrepreneurship, using the provided curriculum.
• Specifically, mentor schedule will be as follows:
  • Join one weekly lecture taught by a Harvard Teaching Fellow, to familiarize yourself with that week’s curricular focus
  • Lead one 1hr instructional session per week for your group of students (prep time ~ 1hr/week)
  • Allot ~15-20mins/day async for answering student questions, debugging code, and providing resources, to support your students in finishing their weekly projects.
• In the last 3 weeks of the program, help students to build their capstone project.

The curricula for the program will be provided, and you will be coached and trained in the curriculum and given mentorship training.

Requirements for applicants

• Passionate about teaching and mentoring younger students; especially invested in mentoring students from backgrounds under-represented in science and technology;
• Currently enrolled or recent graduates from Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related fields;
• Have current/recent experience with middle school STEM teaching;
• Excellent communication, time-management and teamwork skills;
• Comfortable speaking to small groups in a virtual setting;
• Energetic and enthusiastic 
• Willing and able to commit to 3-5 hours per week from Sept. 1st - Dec 9th 2024 and from Jan 7th - Jan 30th 2025 (program break from Dec 10th - Jan 6th)
• Willing and able to commit to 3 hours per day for 6 days in July/August for being trained in the SureStart AI curriculum.

Preferred but not required

• Experience with front-end design, app design, and/or UI/UX development;
• Experience with AppInventor, Scratch or other block-based programming
• Familiarity with common GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc.

Benefits

• You will deepen your technical knowledge (look up 'protege effect')
• Work on exciting, challenging and rewarding work critical to the future of ethical AI 
• Build up your CV with fantastic leadership and team management experience
• Have the opportunity to attend technical talks, and professional skills seminars
• Valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders in tech and academia
• Be an integral part of a movement to build future AI leaders

If you're excited about being a mentor but are hesitating about the requirements, go ahead and apply anyway - we'd love to hear from you!

Diverse minds building diverse technology is SureStart's mission. We would love to see a wide variety of candidates presenting their unique perspectives, experiences, and skills. We are an equal opportunity employer and highly value diversity. SureStart does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Keywords for this job: AI, GenAI, app development, mobile app development, frontend design, HCI, human computer interaction, UI design, UX design, training, mentorship, MOOC, online training, data science jobs, machine learning jobs, machine vision, affective computing, emotion AI, Natural Language Processing, NLP, internships, interns, co-ops, speech recognition, tts, speech synthesis, image processing, HCI, human computer interaction, Python, Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, data scientist.