Mentoring sessions are designed to be a dedicated space where students can deeply engage in career exploration, seek personalized advice, and develop the necessary knowledge and skills and succeed in their journey both in industry and academia.
At the heart of our mentoring initiative is the commitment to an inclusive, respectful, and supportive learning environment.
Applications will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis. Priority deadline is May 12.
What is the Professional Development Mentorship Program?
The Mentorship Program is part of Neuromatch’s and Climatematch’s Professional Development curriculum within its live courses.
We offer a system of personalized professional development, where mentors and mentees are paired considering their preferences and areas of interest.
The weekly 1h-mentoring sessions enable networking expansion and the discussion of several vocational aspects.
Why should you sign up as a mentor?
Becoming a mentor is an opportunity to contribute significantly to the next generation of scientists and professionals. By sharing your knowledge, experiences, and insights, you can help shape the careers of students, guiding them through the complexities of their field.
Benefits
- Make a lasting impact on someone’s career.
- Give back to the scientific community, passing on the knowledge and support you’ve received in your career.
- Expand your network by connecting with other professionals who are equally committed to fostering growth.
2024 Mentorship Schedule
All meetings take place via Zoom. As a mentor, you need to be consistently available at one of the five timeslots for all dates for the course you sign up for.
Convert UTC to your time zone here.
| Course | Dates | Times in UTC |
| Computational Neuroscience | Thursdays, July 11, 18, 25 | Slot 1: 02:30 – 03:30 UTC Slot 2: 11:30 – 12:30 UTC Slot 3: 08:30 – 09:30 UTC Slot 4: 15:00 – 16:00 UTC Slot 5: 00:30 – 01:30 UTC |
| Deep Learning | Wednesdays, July 11, 18, 25 | Slot 1: 02:30 – 03:30 UTC Slot 2: 11:30 – 12:30 UTC Slot 3: 08:30 – 09:30 UTC Slot 4: 15:00 – 16:00 UTC Slot 5: 00:30 – 01:30 UTC |
| NeuroAI | Thursdays, July 18 & 25 | Slot 1: 00:30 – 01:30 UTC Slot 2: 10:00 – 11:00 UTC Slot 3: 07:00 – 08:00 UTC Slot 4: 13:00 – 14:00 UTC Slot 5: 22:30 – 23:30 UTC |
| Computational Tools for Climate Change | Wednesdays, July 18 & 25 | Slot 1: 00:30 – 01:30 UTC Slot 2: 10:00 – 11:00 UTC Slot 3: 07:00 – 08:00 UTC Slot 4: 13:00 – 14:00 UTC Slot 5: 22:30 – 23:30 UTC |
Your role as a Mentor
As a mentor, your primary responsibilities include:
- Understand the students’ backgrounds and aspirations
- Students will come from different backgrounds and will attend courses on Neuro AI, Comp Neuroscience, Deep learning, and Comp Climate Science that require multidisciplinary skills. Mentors must understand students’ needs, aspirations, and career goals. This will help to provide more personalized career advice and help students to succeed in their career path.
- Guiding career development
- Offer insights into possible career paths in academia or industry based on your personal experience. Discuss the pros and cons of different paths and explain to students the different roles available and the challenges they will face. Encourage students to consider their long-term goals and career interests.
- Encouraging skill development and career advice
- Help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and how to improve through internships, research projects, and extracurricular courses. Suggest to them how to get ready for their Ph.D. applications or technical interviews, and how to enhance their research opportunities and portfolios.
- Facilitating networking
- Networking represents a crucial part of career development. Suggest to students how to grow their network by attending seminars, conferences, or workshops. Share your experience and tell them why it’s important to build connections both in academia and industry.
- Neuromatch and Climatematch host networking events and the Impact Scholar Program to help students share their research and build connections after the courses end.
- Offering Feedback
- Provide constructive feedback on student’s ideas, projects, and plans, encouraging reflective thinking and continuous improvement. Making decisions, at any stage, can be stressful and overwhelming. Mentors should be empathetic and supportive and offer recommendations and encouragement at the right moment.
What’s expected?
Mentors will first choose which course they’d like to be a mentor for: Computational Neuroscience, Deep Learning, NeuroAI, or Computational Tools for Climate Science.
Mentors are expected to choose their preferred topics to discuss from the list below:
- PhD Applications
- Academic Job Applications
- Industry Job Applications
- Academia to Industry Transition
- Networking in Academia and Industry
- Research Concepts and Project Execution
- Technical Skills Development
- Professional Communication
- Time Management and Work-Life Balance
Mentors will also be provided with guidelines for interactions and are expected to mentor a small group of students in 2 or 3 1h-mentoring sessions.
How to sign up as a mentor
Sign up through the link below. You will be asked to provide information about your professional background, areas of expertise, and any specific interests you have in mentoring. You will also have the opportunity to specify your availability for mentoring sessions.
Applications will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis. Priority deadline is May 12.
FAQs & Tips!
Tips for being a mentor
- Set clear expectations to ensure that you and your mentees are aligned and working towards common goals.
- Practice active listening and show genuine interest in your mentee’s perspectives.
- Provide constructive feedback and frame it in a way that encourages growth and learning, rather than discouragement.
- Encourage self-reflection.
- Share your experience. Share both successes and failures to provide a realistic perspective on the path ahead.
- Maintain professionalism and ethics in your interactions
How many Prof Dev sessions are planned during the summer school?
Students will meet their mentor each week for one hour, so depending on the course, there will be 2 or 3 live mentoring sessions.
How many students will be assigned to each mentor?
Every mentor will be assigned to a small cohort of students (≈5), depending on the preferences expressed by students and mentors during the enrollment and sign-up process.
What is the aim of the mentoring sessions?
Mentoring sessions are intended to be a moment for students to network and reflect on their career path. Mentors have the privilege and duty to guide students through their journey in academia and industry.
During mentoring sessions will technical projects be developed? I’ve already been a mentor in the previous editions, what has changed this year?
Previous academy mentoring sessions were devoted to supporting students with projects, but this year mentoring sessions are focused on professional development including vocational aspects and career advice. Students will develop their code and projects during the course with their TAs and discuss their careers with mentors.
I’m a student, how can I make the most out of my mentoring experience?
- Enthusiasm to the max: mentoring is a great opportunity to have someone with more professional and academic experience advise you on your journey. It is a learning and networking opportunity, at which you may find someone to look up to, to collaborate with or just from which to draw off more passion to follow your own path.
- Be sincere to yourself and to your mentor: it is best to have expectations clear and refined. Your first session might initiate with getting to know each other, where you are at the moment and where you want to get in the mid and long run. In the session, each one should make clear what they expect, reshape those expectations to be realistic and useful, and find a dynamic that benefits all parts.
- Self-knowledge: you are not expected to know everything about your professional interests, but rather it is important for you to have a clear picture of where you are at the moment, and maybe a rough idea of what you want to achieve. Being conscious of your current state will help you get the best advice possible for you.
- Keep a respectful and warm tone to the conversation: even though it has a professional tone to it, mentoring is, in essence, a social interaction. You may construct a long-lasting relationship with either your mentor or your peers (or both!). Thus, be kind and have fun, as you’ll be discussing your dreams and career goals, as well as the efforts you’ve made so far to follow them.
- Some planification: on one hand, you might want to have a rough drawing of what you might want to talk about during your mentoring sessions. It could range between your worries on how to apply to grad school, lab experience, and finding collaboration opportunities, among other things. This will facilitate you having a base from which to talk to, rather than trying to come up with something on site.
- Flexibility is key: on the other hand, planning beforehand shouldn’t mean wanting to follow everything you imagined. Depending on the dynamics in the mentoring room, you might not be able to talk about everything you wanted to, or you might’ve talked about things you didn’t even consider before. Feeling like you’re being pushed out of your comfort zone might be a common thought during those sessions, so it might be best to adapt and maximize your learning out of it.
- Own your actions: a mentor is there to help you find some insight, but not to solve the problems you presented yourself. In some cases, help might come as just verbal advice. In other cases, they might give you resources (books, links to institutes or emails of peers whom to contact). But in the end, you must take action based on this advice, your interests and capabilities. If you have doubts about the actions you have to take, that might also be a topic of discussion with your mentor.
- Notes, work and repeat: during or after your mentoring session, you might want to write some notes down on what was said that will be of interest. After that, try to make changes that correspond to the advice that was given to you, so that when you meet up again with your mentor, you can provide some advances to them.
Mentor Resources
NMA and CMA
- NMA Professional Development Talks and Seminars on YouTube
- CMA 2023 Career Panels on YouTube
- CMA 2023 Impact Talks on YouTube