How to run the mentorship program¶
This is a step-by-step guide to running the mentorship program. Note that this program has generally been run by the Activities Committee.
Resources¶
One of the most important things you’ll want is to get access to is the
mentors@scipy.org email address. This is a Google email address, and
if need be you can ask Jim Weiss (or whomever else is at NumFOCUS who
can help with admin) to reset the password for you.
While we do ask people if they want to be a part of the mentorship program at registration, we have started sending a survey to those interested closer to the conference to get more details about participants so that you can make better matches.
To get more information about program participants, we have been sending them a Google Form to try and get more information about them. You can see the 2024 Form here. The editable document is here (contact Jim Weiss if you need access). Make a copy for the current program year.
General schedule¶
(Early in the year) Check to see if the conference signup has the option for people to sign up for the mentorship program. We would have language like “Do you want to sign up for the SciPy mentorship program?” and they can select “Yes, as a mentor”/“Yes, as a mentee”/“No”.
(2-4 weeks before the conference) Get the list of people who have signed up for the mentorship program. Make sure that you get whether they have a virtual or in-person ticket. Email them the survey (text below) to get details for as many folks as you can.
I’ve often had to send out a reminder email closer to the event in order to get a few more responses.
Some people will get SciPy tickets after you send the survey, you’ll want to make sure to check who has signed in over these few weeks and send out more survey emails as needed.
In my experience, you’ll probably get a 60-80% response rate. C’est la vie.
(1 week - few days before the conference) For whomever didn’t respond to the survey, try and do some quick searching to see if you can fill out the details yourself. I’ve had decent luck starting with LinkedIn and then more open searching. You’ll still have some folks that you cannot get much detail for, but overall I’ve found this is able to get most of the participants.
(1 week - few days before the conference) It’s time to make the matches. There’s a lot more detail on this below, but for now I’ll just say make a large pot of coffee, put on some good tunes, and settle in, this is probably going to take a few good hours.
We usually have an okay balance of mentors to mentees (about 40-50% mentors) and are able to match everyone within mentors’ stated capacity. Occasionally I’ve had to bug the SciPy Organizers Slack channel to ask if we can get a few more people willing to mentor.
(A few days before the conference) Send out all the match emails. I’ve mostly done this manually, but it is possible to automate this (but you need to create an appropriate service account JSON).
Occasionally I’ve had a few mentors who did not get a mentee match (e.g. if we get more mentors than mentees). You will want to let them know that they didn’t get a match, but that you may reach out to them in case of a need to rematch (email below).
(During the conference) Monitor the mentors email inbox for folks who are having trouble reaching their match or any other issues. Reassign mentors/mentees as necessary.
(After the conference) Send out a survey to see how people felt about the mentorship program. This may get included with the general SciPy survey.
Email text¶
Sending out the initial survey¶
Hello everyone,
We are sending you this email because you expressed interest in the SciPy Mentorship program when applying for a ticket. In order to best match mentors with mentees, would you please fill out the following form?
INSERT LINK HERE
We will be assigning matches over the next week/next few weeks, and will plan to send out an email with your match (and further instructions) INSERT DATE CLOSE TO CONFERENCE. If you have any questions, or are unable to do the mentorship program for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact us.
All the best, NAMES OF ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE SciPy 202X Activities Committee
Reminder to complete the survey¶
Hello everyone,
Just a reminder to please fill out the intake form for the mentorship program if you can over the next few days.
INSERT LINK HERE
Thank you for your time! NAMES OF ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE SciPy 202X Activities Committee
Mentorship match email, in person¶
Hello everyone,
Thank you for signing up to participate in the 202X SciPy Mentorship Program. With this email, we would like to introduce mentors and mentees to each other. Please find below your Mentorship Program buddy:
Mentor: MENTOR NAME Mentee: MENTEE NAME
We tried to match the program participants as best as we could taking into consideration their areas of work, professional interests, and employment sectors.
The expectations for this program are for the mentor and mentee to meet for at least an hour during the SciPy’2X conference week (LIST DATES). Both of you have indicated that you are attending the conference in person. While there is no official schedule for this program, we recommend meeting for lunch earlier in the week.
We encourage you to connect with your mentor/mentee as soon as you read this message. Don’t be shy! Networking, collaboration, volunteering, and mentoring are the foundations this community is built on.
If you don’t hear from your mentor/mentee by Tuesday, DATE OF CONFERENCE, or run into any other issues, don’t hesitate to contact us at mentors@scipy.org. Please note that the SciPy Code of Conduct (https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct) applies to all events related to the conference, including the mentorship program.
Enjoy the conference!
The SciPy Activities Committee - NAMES
Mentorship match email, at least one person virtual¶
Hello everyone,
Thank you for signing up to participate in the 202X SciPy Mentorship Program. With this email, we would like to introduce mentors and mentees to each other. Please find below your Mentorship Program buddy:
Mentor: MENTOR NAME Mentee: MENTEE NAME
We tried to match the program participants as best as we could taking into consideration their areas of work, professional interests, and employment sectors.
The expectations for this program are for the mentor and mentee to meet for at least an hour during the SciPy’2X conference week (DATES OF CONFERENCE). (One of/Both) of you has indicated that you are attending the conference virtually, so you will need to set up a call for you to meet. Feel free to use a video/audio conferencing platform of your choice. If you’d like to use software that is free and open source, try Jitsi https://meet.jit.si/.
We encourage you to connect with your mentor/mentee as soon as you read this message. Don’t be shy! Networking, collaboration, volunteering, and mentoring are the foundations this community is built on.
If you don’t hear from your mentor/mentee by Tuesday, DATE OF CONFERENCE, or run into any other issues, don’t hesitate to contact us at mentors@scipy.org. Please note that the SciPy Code of Conduct (https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct) applies to all events related to the conference, including the mentorship program.
Enjoy the conference!
The SciPy Activities Committee - NAMES
Unmatched mentor¶
NEED TO GO FIND A COPY OF THIS
How to go about making matches¶
It’s spreadsheet time!¶
Get all the responses from the Google form and paste in a new spreadsheet. Copy in all the other people who have signed up to the program but didn’t answer the form, and fill in missing details as best you can (this is your Step 3). Divide up the mentors and mentees into two new spreadsheets.
The first thing I do is mark virtual attendees, both mentors and mentees. I usually just color the rows to help them stand out. I try as best I can to pair virtual with virtual and in-person with in-person, though sometimes there will be a few matches between virtual and in person folks in order to balance things out.
Next, I will break out the mentors and mentees into different categories based on the field of expertise - so there will be blocks for Physics/Astro/Chemistry, Biology/Health, Social Science/Econ, Meteorology/Geology/Oceanography/Petrology, CompSci/DS/ML, Software Engineering, and Other. My goal is to have roughly equivalent sizes of these bins for both mentors and mentees, and because people can multiselect these fields I have a bit of flexibility to move people around in these bins to try and get more equivalent sizes. If I don’t know anything about people’s field (e.g. they didn’t submit the survey and I can’t find them online) I will bin them in other.
Finally, it’s time to make the matches. In both the mentor and mentee pages, make a new column that’s “mentor match” / “mentee match”. As I make matches I will note who gets matched with who in each, so I can double-check what I’ve done.
Within the field bins, I will first try to pair virtual to virtual. Next, I will try to use the sector and notes fields to make the best matches I can within a field. I try and prioritize getting every mentor matched with one mentee first before starting to double up mentees with mentors, but just do the best you can.
You’ll probably find that you may need to change matches around a bit to make everything fit. Try to remember to change both the mentor match and mentee match fields, but I find that it’s helpful to do a bit of double-checking at the end to make sure that the mentor -> mentee and mentee -> mentor matches agree.
ADD SOME PYTHON CODE I USE TO CHECK, AND A BUNCH OF IMAGES.
Other things to keep in mind¶
Sometimes people will make a different decision about being mentors/mentees in between their signup and the Google Form. I’ve generally regarded the Google Form as being a bit closer to “ground truth”, but you can try and use your judgement (or send the person an email to clarify).
It sometimes happens that you’ll make a match where people are already colleagues (their interests align so well!). It might be helpful to double check for any similar email addresses (e.g. if both are from the same university). We could potentially add a question to the form that asks people their current institutional affiliation as well.
