Dear Past Ian,

When you become a college professor, you’re going to be leading student teams. That doesn’t just make you a mentor or an expert designer, it makes you Lead Designer, that thing you swore you never wanted to be. Also all of your team are students, so not even entry-level, so you’re playing Lead Designer on the highest difficulty setting. FFS find some books about leadership and read them now while you have some time, so this stuff isn’t blindsiding you on every project.

Also, take some time while settling in to make some alliances with the Diversity & Inclusion office, because the hardest student problems you’re going to deal with are going to involve students making missteps when it comes to gender, race, disability, and similar issues among their teammates, and as someone who checks just about every Privilege checkbox there is, you’re not going to be imminently equipped to mediate some of these things on a marginalized student’s behalf. Set up those mechanisms ahead of time so that when you do need help, it’s there and not something you have to figure out in real time.

Last thing: on each student team there’s going to usually be one de facto Team Lead on that team that emerges, and that student will have even less leadership experience than you, and sometimes they’ll be a natural for that role but sometimes they’ll be intensely frustrated and challenged and won’t know what to do, and you’re going to have to step in not just as a Design Mentor but as a Leadership Mentor, so reach out to your friends in industry and write your own unofficial “Lead textbook” so you have at least something to tell them.