Mentors, Motivation, and Magic: Guest Post from Breakout Mentors CEO Brian Skinner

Let’s zoom out for a minute to examine the benefits to learning for a high school student. Why do we care so much about learning? Grades? Future jobs? Hard to define terms like well-rounded individuals or upstanding citizens?

Often you’ll see this broken down into intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Are you doing it to get external validation, like an A in the class or admission to a selective university? That is certainly important, as a Stanford engineering graduate I am not going to argue it isn’t, but there is more to learning. Plus focusing on an external goal may not even be the most effective way to reach it.

Image by @heylagostechie on Unsplash

Mentors Inspire and Build Confidence

My experience over the last decade mentoring young students learning to code has reinforced the importance of inspiration and confidence as learning benefits. This is especially true for a technical field outside the core curriculum. 

Arthur C. Clarke once said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To the typical middle school or high school student, computer science is opaque. It seems like a superpower that is far out of reach. 

If we can inspire our students to get started with consistent learning effort, then confidence will follow. Although we don’t possess a special trick for intrinsic motivation, the one-on-one learning model helps. Students develop a personal connection with a mentor just 5-8 years older who is personally passionate about the subject. The mentor’s excitement is infectious and keeps students engaged through the challenging beginning, until the student themselves feels the learning growth.

This is why we love to hear quotes like this from our customers:

“I want you to know that with his mentor’s help, my son has been the programming guru from day one in freshman year. Without you finding the perfect mentor for my son that could have been a much harder journey for us.”

Image by @carlevarino on Unsplash

Mentors Pique Curiosity, Leading to Projects

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Learning a new skill gives a new perspective. A new lens to view the world. It drives curiosity, you can’t help but think “I have this hammer, now what can I do with it?”

Coding is a powerful tool. Particularly our advanced high school students who are focusing on Machine Learning, which draws insights from data. They start to see use cases all around them, like an automatic bank check reader at an ATM. Then they easily turn that curiosity into project ideas, like one of our students did an ML image project detecting pneumonia in chest x-rays.

Image by @thisisengineering on Unsplash

Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Results

The funny thing is, intrinsic motivation can produce the confidence and curiosity needed for extrinsic results. It might even be more effective than focusing on the extrinsic result from the start.

For example on college applications. They love to see a driven student pursuing a goal outside of what is taught in class. They love to see real world applications, taking something the student learned and using it to improve their community.

Figure out your own intrinsic motivation flywheel. It may be slow progress to start, you may not have a vision for where you will end up, but the impressive results will follow.

Brian Skinner is the Founder and CEO of Breakout Mentors. To learn to code with 1-on-1 help from Stanford and UC Berkeley mentors, contact Brian at brian@breakoutmentors.com.