This EURAXESS Mentoring Program Monthly meeting was focused on the first steps that are very important for setting up the successful mentorship. There are plenty of newcomers that need orientation and welcoming in the mentoring program community. The coordinators' team kindly invited all members to join and cooperate for more successful mentorships.
As always the meeting was open to researchers that are not yet members but would like to learn more about the program. Please, feel free to spread the news among your colleagues! Thanks for sharing the link to this page!
PRESENTATION can be downloaded from the event page!
The agenda included:
- News about the program - we become more and more popular, the numbers encourage us to continue supporting the program:
- about 11 500 researchers visit our webpage from all over the world, the most active countries are USA, India and Brazil
- we are proud that female researchers visitng the webpage are more than 62% and the highest number of visits is made by young researchers 25-35 years old
- starting from the new 2023 we are planning to offer a new series of webinars and virtual training that will cover wider range of topics and will deepen the researchers' skills
- Orientation for newcomers - we reminded to all newcomers that they need to be active in order to get the best out of the program, prepare the plan, the questions and fulfill carefully all the tasks that they agree with the mentor - some tips and detailes were provided
- Questions & Discussion on how to improve our mothly meetings (share your ideas here and we will discuss them at the meeting - https://forms.gle/jAFUqjMXtQHdaxSL8 ) - we have more than 80 responses to the permanently open survey, we addressed all the suggestions and remarks from the open quesstion on improving:
- Collaboration Project match – in the mentorship couple, in the LinkedIn group, during the meeting
- A basic English language course for academics since the language spoken in the Programme is the English. – only the 1st communication is in English, couple can communicate in any other language by joint choice
- 1.The program is good to be shared not only for coulleges (in which I already did) but also for students (who want to pursue their degree abroad or get the knowledge related to this program). 2.Also, I hope either mentor or mentee can have a chance to present related to his/her own research in the larger scope (such as in a monthly meeting event). – this can happen as well in the in the LinkedIn group,
- it would be more efficient and practical if its possible to share other experiences related to work/life balance in academia ,paper to policy, and paper to business experiences faced by the academics , project management and project proposal writing tips (most of the academics fail to transfert information about it and its a black box that need to be discovered) . – you may use for this purpose the EURAXESS virtual training, connect with the trainers and have their support for free
- To remind mentors to kindly decline a mentorship within a few weeks, not months. Thank you ( I asked some about 4 months ago and I am still waiting, my guess is that she declines to be my mentor and that´s OK, I would have liked a response, though).
- Relevant content: how to succed as a researcher, job oppurtunities in industry – we suggest using profile functionalities and EURAXESS jobs portal
- The certificate could have included the titles of the contents, seminars, and the course load of the meetings with mentors who participants realized during the Programme on the back of the certificate. These pieces of information are very important to show the knowledge that students had in the course. - next time we’ll request this info from you to be included for those that wish so!
- Collaboration: for more collaboration, I think we should connect with each other – use the LinkedIn group, share emails during the monthly meeting
- Maybe it will be useful to combine invited speakers plus tematic discussion. – please, suggest by email or in the survey a topic and a speaker!
- to open post-doc positions in Sofia University for Bulgarian and other citizens. – we do this, all published on the EURAXESS jobs portal
- Sharing experience - 2 mentors and few mentees shared their experience with the newcomers
Looking forward to see you next month!