Mentoring undergraduates into cyber-facilitator roles

There is a shortage of training programs for research cyber-facilitators and the need is only growing, especially in academia. This paper will discuss the importance of developing a workforce at the undergraduate level, creating a formal program for training and mentoring undergraduates in Research Computing at Purdue University, and how the approach to mentoring has evolved. The hands-on training and mentoring program has changed from one with students working as junior HPC administrators, performing hardware break-fix in a relative vacuum, to one with students working closely with their mentors, building real-world cyberinfrastructure solutions, such as distributed computing environments. More recently, the mentoring program has grown to include facilitating and supporting research applications with the Purdue user community. Finally, outcomes for the students in these programs lessons learned will be discussed.