I assume you are fessing up to your relative level of experience/non experience, and that's very helpful. Before I reported for training I read a lot of info on this site/thread and I can confirm that although it seemed to be coming from knowledgeable sources, some of it was way off. You are correct about directing questions to ALPA mentors and other people with experience, but one must still be careful to consider the source's position in the company, longevity, biases, etc... And then, some things are not knowable; for example, no one I talked to in Eagan and DTW predicted that the wait for OE would be a matter of months instead of weeks.