Change Grad Mentor to simply Mentor so any ML member can be selected as a mentor

[jonfroehlich]

We should be able to select 'Mikey' as a grad mentor

[jonfroehlich]

Actually, I think Grad Mentor should be changed to simply Mentor so that we can select any active member (or maybe even collaborator) as a mentor

[jonfroehlich]

I would also consider adding a co-mentor blank.

[jonfroehlich]

Actually not an easy fix because requires renaming the field grad_mentor to mentor, which requires writing custom migration code, which will require direct access to server from Jason. So, pushing this off for now.

[jonfroehlich]

Revisiting this in 2026 — most of it is already resolved, and I'm closing it out with PR #1373.

Selectability (the core ask): already fixed. The mentor dropdown is no longer grad-only. get_active_mentors_queryset() now offers any active senior lab member — PhD/MS students, postdocs, the director, software developers, designers, and research scientists. So the original "we should be able to select Mikey" case works today.

Label: fixed in #1373. The only thing still reading "Grad Mentor" was the admin field label. PR #1373 sets verbose_name='Mentor' so it now reads simply "Mentor", matching the behavior. (Public bios already said "mentored by …", never "grad mentor".)

The underlying DB column keeps its historical name on purpose: our migrations are regenerated non-interactively per environment, so an actual field rename would be applied as drop+add and lose the data — that was the server-access blocker I noted back in 2019. The label change has no schema impact, so it ships cleanly without IT involvement.

Co-mentor field: intentionally not doing this — no demand for it since 2019.

Closing as resolved by #1373.