Not just anyone should be a co-op supervisor
we want to give our co-op students the best possible experience
To be a co-op supervisor we strongly prefer some managerial experience. This can include being a project maanger or subteam lead at WARG. management is hard and we don’t want our managers to be learning for the first time on co-op students. in the past this has usually been subteam leads, but this really isn’t a requirement.
Co-op Students need to be given fun projects for a good experience. They need to be given lots of mentorship to learn. Essentially it's a lot of time for a supervisor, they should be aware of this commitment. We don't wanna be a "co-op mill" where people come to get the credit and accomplish/learn absolutely nothing bc they spent their time doing boring stuff.
managers need to be able to give critical useful feedback and assign meaningful projects with clear tasks to ensure co-op student learning
for F24 we are expanding into general members and advisors as co-op supervisors.
some criteria to help leads select who is a reasonable supervisor and who is not qualified enough should be added here.
Professor Teertstra has some evaluation criteria, but we’d like to do the filtering internally to ensure all our co-ops get a great experience!
Being an upper year helps significantly in this because it ensures you have some technical expertise. Having this technical expertise is important so you can have some pieces of knowledge to pass along to your co-op student. Having strong co-op experiences (i.e. Cali) is also useful in supplementing this because you have seen how some tech companies operate so you can teach your co-op student those best practices.
Historically co-op managers should be 3A or above unless they strongly satisfy the above criteria. Someone with technical experience is key for mentorship, a hint of managerial experience is key for tasks.
This criteria essentially encompasses everything in Project Manager Promotion Criteria while adding in technical expertise, capability to get much more hands on in teaching, etc.