Using Professional Consultants To Mentor Cis Students On A Simulated Consulting Project

Students who graduate from the Computer Information Systems major at James Madison University tend to be hired by consulting firms. In support of this, our program has developed an IT Consulting class. This class is team taught by members of the consulting firms that hire our students and a faculty member. The consulting firms also serve as mentors to the students in the class as student teams respond to a simulated Request for Proposal. This paper describes our class and the mentoring role taken by the consultants. We describe outcomes of this mentoring relationship from both the consultants' and the students' perspective.