Cohorts

Cohorts split a program into time-bounded intakes, each with its own dates and its own mentor and mentee caps. Open a program, then its Cohorts section, to add and manage them.

A program works fine without any cohort. Cohorts are for when you want to run a program in rounds (a spring intake, a fall intake) or cap how many mentors and mentees a specific round can take.

Adding a cohort

On a program's Cohorts section, click Add cohort. The New cohort dialog asks for:

• Name: required (for example Spring 2026). The Add cohort button stays disabled until a name is entered.
• Starts / Ends: optional date fields.
• Max mentors / Max mentees: optional whole numbers. Leave them blank for unlimited (the field shows ∞ as a placeholder).

Click Add cohort to save. Each cohort row then shows its date range, any capacity caps, and a status badge.

Cohort status

A new cohort starts in Planning status. From there a cohort can move through applications_open, matching, active, completed, and archived, but the program cockpit has no control yet to change a cohort's status once created. A cohort with no one enrolled is valid and can sit in Planning indefinitely.

Capacity caps

When a cohort has a Max mentors or Max mentees cap set, enrolling past it is blocked with "This cohort is at capacity for [role]s ([cap])." Raise the cap on the cohort, or enroll into a different cohort, then try again. Approving an application into a full cohort fails the same way. See Applicants for what approving an application does.

Enrolling without a cohort

An enrollment doesn't have to belong to a cohort. When someone is enrolled with no cohort chosen (whether by an operator or from an application that didn't specify one), there is no capacity limit to check, so the enrollment always succeeds. Capacity caps only ever apply once a cohort is actually selected.