Importance of Mentoring: Life with ScholarX 2021 🎓- Mentee Diaries #01
From onwards today I am going to share my experience in ScholarX 2021 programme which is a mentoring programme. This is the very first article of it & I will begin with some introduction of this whole process.
What is Mentoring?
In simple words it is a conversation that takes place mainly with an experienced person. But following interpretation of Mentoring clearly states what mentoring is.
Mentoring takes place between young persons (i.e., mentees) and older or more experienced persons (i.e., mentors) who are acting in a non-professional helping capacity to provide support that benefits one or more areas of the mentee’s development.
Importance of Mentoring
In the process of mentoring there is a mentor and mentee.
A mentor is a person or friend who guides a less experienced person by building trust and modeling positive behaviors
A mentee is someone who has identified a specific personal or professional goal and who believes that the guidance and help of a mentor — and being held accountable to the mentor — can help them achieve their goal
Now we focus what is the importance & what are the advantages of mentoring.
01. Mentors provide information and knowledge
02. Mentors can see where we need to improve where we often cannot
03. Mentors offer encouragement and help keep us going
04. Mentors have the experiences you can learn from to prevent making the same mistakes beginners make
05. Mentors find ways to stimulate our personal and professional growth
What is ScholarX ?
“ScholarX is an exclusive 6-month program aimed at providing mentoring support to a selected pool of high Potential undergraduate students based in Sri Lanka ideally by a Sri Lankan expat currently engaged with one of the world’s top universities or Fortune 500 companies. It’s our free premium mentoring platform by Sri Lankans for Sri Lankans working towards creating a culture of knowledge and expertise sharing without the limitation of geographical borders.” — SEF Global
ScholarX program helps undergraduates in Sri Lanka to provide them a free premium mentorship from the successful & very experienced people in many fields like Software Engineering etc. The ScholarX 2019 & ScholarX 2020 programs were huge successes which inspired me to apply for the this year program when I got to know about this programme from one of my senior at University of Kelaniya who was also a mentee previously. This time in ScholarX 2021, there is a great collection of mentors (75+) of covering almost all the areas considering every undergraduate. There are about more than 250+ mentees this time which clearly shows how successful this event is.
For more information about the ScholarX program you can visit, https://sefglobal.org/scholarx/2021/
My Mentor: Professor Arosha Bandara
When I got the confirmation email that I am a ScholarX 2021 mentee I was very happy that I got this valuable opportunity. Because this is a very rare opportunity that an undergraduate can get during his/her university life. My assigned mentor is Professor Arosha Bandara who is related to Software Engineering field. So, I would like to express my gratitude towards ScholarX program for giving me the opportunity to get connected with him who is a great person.
My assigned mentor is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Open University whose research addresses the practical problems associated with building and maintaining self-managing (adaptive) systems by combining rigorous formal techniques with concrete implementations and applications of those techniques. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, UK in 2005, prior to that he worked as a Software Engineer at Sapient Corporation, USA.
His areas of expertise are:
âś… Software engineering
âś… adaptive systems
âś… human centered computing
âś… cyber security
âś… research and academic leadership
For me details you can visit Professor Arosha bandara’s linkedin profile, https://www.linkedin.com/in/akbandara/
My Experience with the Mentor so far…
In the very first meeting I have to face some issues due to bad internet connection. My mentor realized the situation & rescheduled the meeting. Even he tried to get a phone call to carryout our first meeting. But that was not successful as I was having a really bad signal issue at that time. So, at that moment I realized he is very good person & and a perfect mentor because he understood my situation.
After that incident our first meeting was happened on 05th of May 2021. In that meeting initially we introduced ourselves before discussing the main flow. Then I described my short & long term goals as we were carrying out the discussion. We discussed those goals and reasons for having them. And also what are the inspirations that caused those goals. Also he gave a lot of suggestions about these & this session was a very friendly conversation rather than a traditional professor-student conversation. So, from the very first meeting my enthusiasm & interest towards this got boosted.
During the very first meeting I was able to know lots of stuff regarding doing MSc & PhD. He explained their importance & what should I have to do in order to carry out my career in those paths. Up to now that is the simplest & very clear explanation about that topic. Also, we discussed the field of Software Engineering & the role of a developer. At that point he explained his experience of software development as a Software Engineer rather than explaining it like a professor. His immense experience in those fields is amazing & I am very confident that I will get a huge knowledge during this six month period.
After the main discussion we discussed to setup a time for the mentoring sessions. So, bi-weekly sessions were scheduled & furthermore he explained what should I do during these sessions and after the sessions. I was given a task to maintain a log to note down the points that we are discussing during the sessions. This very first session was a very organized & successful one.
It’s almost one & half month passed in the six months period. I hope to learn more and unlock new areas in life with the time & guidance of my mentor.
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Stay tuned for more articles like this in the future!
