Mentoring Opportunities in Computer Architecture: Analyzing the Past to Develop the Future

Abstract

Academic mentoring programming is a powerful tool used for supporting, engaging, and retaining students in their fields of study. Researchers have long known the positive effects of academic mentoring, particularly for students from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds. The computer architecture community currently hosts an assortment of mentoring programs geared toward women, underrepresented students, junior graduate students, and undergraduates alike.In this work, we describe the current state of mentoring opportunities for students in computer architecture. In addition to summarizing various mentoring programs (e.g., CWWMCA, YArch, and uArch), this work details the organization and feedback from two programs (MaSA and MaSS) that the authors currently run and organize. Based on feedback from these short-term mentoring programs, along with relevant mentoring research literature, we identify opportunities for developing more productive longer-term mentoring programming for the computer architecture community. Following mentoring literature, this work makes a strong case for offering both short-term and long-term mentoring programs in the future; in particular, mentoring literature show the need for time in forming mentoring relationships for mentees to receive the multifaceted benefits of mentoring.ACM Reference Format:Elba Garza, Gururaj Saileshwar, Udit Gupta, Tianyi Liu, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Saugata Ghose, and Joel Emer. 2021. Mentoring Opportunities in Computer Architecture: Analyzing the Past to Develop the Future. In WCAE ’21: Workshop on Computer Architecture Education, June 17,2021, Online. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn