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Comment by surrTurr | Hacker News Reader

What are some good starting points for finding a mentor as student, if you’re not working as a junior developer yet? Not having a senior developer, who’s there to answer your programming/career questions, seems to be one of the biggest downsides of not working for a company.

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One thing to try might be contributing to Open Source?

Choose a project that looks interesting to you (ideally with a large community and modern tech stack) and join their Slack/Discord/Mailing List. You'll need to be patient and humble and it's going to take a while until you feel really comfortable, but read a lot, ask questions and try to contribute small bits here and there.

This will put you in touch with many interesting and experienced people, plus it's usually a great learning experience.

A good way to find mentors when you are a student is to join a developer communities.

Here are some ways:

1. Join local Meetups: There's no substitute for offline communication.

2. Join Online community on Slack/Discord/IRC etc: Pick your favorite tool(programming language, framework, libraries etc) and get involved on Github, StackOverflow.

Also, you need to balance the relationship. How do you add value to their life is something to ponder about.

Get involved in undergrad research at your department. And if you do so, work in person with your mentor and team. You won't get much out of it unless you're immersed in that environment and get the connections and social growth from it.

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