Celebrating 3 years of the CorrelAid Mentoring Program

One important pillar of our work at CorrelAid is to support the education of our socially committed and involved data enthusiasts. With more than  2200 members in our CorrelAid network, we have access to a diverse set of experiences: From people just starting out in their data journey to experienced professionals from academia and industry.

That’s what led us to launch the CorrelAid Mentoring Program in 2020: By connecting our community as mentors and mentees we enable them to share their knowledge and learn from each other. Being part of a mentorship is beneficial both for mentors and mentees: Mentors practice their social and leadership skills, expand their knowledge in and outside their field and grow their network. Mentees can improve their skills based on tailored advice given by subject matter experts and can find an experienced sounding board in their mentor.

We’ve just now wrapped up our third cohort of our yearly 6-month program. Every year we successfully connect around 70-120 participants and we’ve gotten a ton of great feedback over the years. Among other things, we have heard from mentees improving their programming skills or finding their first job after university with the help of their mentor. Some pairs even continued their mentor-mentee relationship after the program had ended.

 

Here’s what some former mentors and mentees have to say about our program:

"I had a good and instructive time with my mentor. I can highly recommend participating in the mentoring program to anyone who has fun developing both professionally and personality-wise."

"My goal as a late-stage master's student was to find a PhD position after graduation. Now I have one, and I owe it in large part to my mentor, who is a researcher in my field and has given me lots of valuable advice. So thank you very much for making this happen in the first place!"

"The mentoring program is a great idea. Demystifying data science on the job and sharing experiences are a great reflection process - especially when you can alleviate concerns and doubts of someone else at the same time. And sharing some coding knowledge is also always fun!"

That’s why we will kick off round number four this autumn, so stay tuned! Sign up for our CorrelAid newsletter and you won’t miss it.

By the way: the mentoring program is entirely organized by volunteers and we’re always looking for people joining the organizer team. If you’re interested in being part of a great program and meeting a ton of interesting people, reach out to us via e-mail at mentoring@correlaid.org.