Why did you decide to become a mentor?
Hey there! First of all, thanks for having me here.
I have been mentoring people in earlier phases of their careers ever since I started my Master’s degree, and continued to do so up until now. I am now part of differing mentoring organizations, focusing on both students from my native country (Italy) as well as professionals from all over the world on MentorCruise.
In general I’ve always been keen on helping people solve any kind of issues. I soon realised how important it is to have someone that can answer those thousands of questions and doubts I also had when I was in earlier phases of my career.
In my case I ended up in the position I am now mostly out of chance, not cause I planned it out in advance. I want to make sure that other brilliant people can plan for success ahead of time and consistently work towards those goals.
How did you get your career start?
To complete my studies I had the chance to work on my Master’s Thesis in Stockholm at King, the company developing Candy Crush. It was an extremely interesting and cutting edge project about Reinforcement Learning, basically trying to create an AI that could test new levels before releasing them to humans.
That experienced, plus my university studies in Computer Science, allowed me to land a good graduate position in Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an ML Engineer. The same person who interviewed me was also my mentor when I started. He mentored me in the two years I spent in the company, both on a professional and personal level. He’s an incredibly driven individual and I was lucky to be inspired by him, and I’ve been trying to be the same role model for new starters ever since.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
Broadly speaking, mentees usually reach out for either technical or leadership mentoring.
For technical mentoring, the largest majority of my mentees is trying to prepare for interviews or upskill in a certain domain. The most sought after topics are Coding Interviews, general programming knowledge (mostly in Python and C++), System Design, Machine Learning theory and Cloud technologies (AWS). In both cases I usually first draft a timeline to follow, with links to resources, books, courses, blogs and more to get to the end goal. For every theoretical topic I also link exercises to complete, and usually one large hands-on project to work on while studying. I then follow my mentee’s progress closely and re-adjust the plan if needed.
Leadership instead usually includes people trying to advance in their careers, get a promotion or generally develop their soft skills. There is no one-fits-all recipe for these types of requests, so I always try to dive deep in the mentee’s current situation and work together to understand where we can make meaningful improvements. Though, there is a list of leadership-related books that I always recommend in these cases :)
What’s been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
There isn’t a single success story above all others, most of the mentees I worked with ended up achieving the goal they set for initially! One was very keen on research and ended up pursuing a PhD in the US, two others landed a position in a FAANG company while three others in large companies like BMW.
Generally though, I am already extremely proud when my mentees can explain the time complexities of sorting algorithms in their worst, average and best cases ;)
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
There are two major benefits I’m getting from mentoring other people.
First of all, leadership skills. Mentoring someone requires being able to inspire them, guide them and make sure they achieve their goals on their own, with my support when required. A good mentor should know when to step aside and how to maximize the mentee’s growth, just like a manager or leader would do in a company. These kind of skills transfer extremely easily, so I make treasure of them in my professional career as well.
The second one is related to clear communication and teaching. One thing is knowing and being able to solve lots of complex problems, another one is being able to clearly explain it to other people such that they can also understand them and solve them on their own in the future. I often believed to be good at explaining complex concepts in a simple way, so mentoring is a proving ground for that.