Compass: Supporting Large Group Mentorship in a Chat-Based UI

While mentorship offers many benefits, student access to is often limited. In this paper, we introduce Compass, a chat platform where industry professionals mentor large cohorts of 30+ students with the support novel features that enable full engagement without typical chaos group chat. Specifically, conceptualize conversations as composed not only individual messages, but also multi-person conversational units collapse numbers small related exchanges into single conceptual in main dialogue. Doing so makes it possible preserve coherent linear flow conversation while supporting non-linear can be concisely summarized computationally and built on conversation. We report design lessons learned over year real-world studies culminating final deployment which 2 successfully mentored 10-week period. find both mentors mentees UI effective sometimes preferable, discuss broader implications for conversations.