Why did you decide to become a mentor?
Being a mentor started as an informal act of help to a friend who was new to the field of data analytics. After successfully working together, I realised that it was very a rewarding activity that I enjoyed. Later, I realised that mentoring is essential for my career progression at my organisation. For this reason, I started taking mentorship more seriously, reading about becoming a good mentor, participating in programs such as the KaggleX mentorship program and at internal mentorship programs at my organisation. During these mentoring engagements, I discovered many other benefits of mentorship, such as leadership, building confidence, learning and networking. Finally, given the positive feedback I was receiving from these engagements, I decided to pursue mentorship even more formally on the mentorcruise platform.
How did you get your career start?
After completing my PhD in theoretical physics, as a curious mind, I was looking for a job that involved problem solving and challenging problems. Mathematical modelling (the term data science was coined yet) was the best field where I could apply strong mathematical background to real world application in the industry. Now this field is known as data science. Every problem in data science is a new challenge that I can't wait to solve and model. Throughout my career I have met several colleagues from whom I learnt a lot and our collaboration is still alive even though our paths have separated.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
In my career so far I have had a number of mentees via several platforms, informal and formal. Some mentees come to me for advice for transitioning from the academic world to data science in industry. Other mentees, with non-technical backgrounds, have approached me for an introduction to basic topics and terminology in data science, e.g. supervised vs unsupervised learning, regression vs classification, etc. Explaining these terms in layman's terms have helped many non-technical mentees to navigate the fast-growing field of data science and machine learning. Finally, lately, mentees have come to me for professional advice and how they can advance their career in the corporate world, how to discuss promotions and other related topics.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
My favourite mentorship success is when a mentee gets their first job or succeed in their promotion. My favourite stories are my very first mentorship and last one. In my first mentorship, I helped a new data analyst to understand concepts of machine learning, provided learning material and gave advice about interviews, structuring a CV, and many other tips for landing a career in data science. Within a month after completing their master thesis, my mentee landed their first job, in which they are doing excellent. My last story involves a junior data scientist at my organization (where there is an internal mentorship program). After several sessions, I suggested my mentee that he should feel comfortable and discuss about his promotion. I gave him advice around the topic, how to structure the discussion and built his confidence. A couple of days later, I received a message that he had the discussion indeed and the manager was very supportive of the idea.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
Being a mentor I am benefiting in a number of ways: - Rewarding; Personal satisfaction and reward when mentees achieve their goals - Career development; It improves my ability to lead and grow individuals, which is an important trait for my career development - Leadership; It improves my leadership capabilities by leading them to achieve their goals - Networking; it expands my network of fellow data scientists. My current mentees will become future senior and lead data scientists at leading organisation. Having a wide network of peers is good for my career - Learning; I always learn something new from the mentees. It is usually a new tool, method or algorithm that I was not aware and they would like to get better in it. This pushes me to explore new tools and improve my technical skills.