Why did you decide to become a mentor?
Mainly, I want to give back to students that do not have the luck to find a good mentor early on in their career. On top of that, I am big on open source: I am the lead developer of Surrogates.jl, a new framework to do surrogate modeling in Julia. I developed it under the Google summer of code framework. I believe contributing to Open source is a tremendous learning experience, I want to pass on my knowledge to students that are just starting out as I believe It will pay off massively when they will start looking for internships/graduate role. Plus, It’s so fun!
How did you get your career start?
I come from an Applied Mathematics background. I focused on the statistical and Probability side of things, so getting into Machine learning engineering / scientific computing roles has been a natural step for me.
On top of that, I also have a really strong technical mentor myself: a Data scientist from Amazon. He cleared lots of doubts about career trajectories and tech interviews, a massive leg up at the beginning of my career for which I will be forever grateful.
How do you usually set up mentorships?
For every mentee, I set up weekly call of an hour. Plus, they can send me unlimited emails whenever they feel like they are stuck. The first call in the weekly trial is especially important to set up clear goals with defined timelines.
After that, depending on the style the mentee likes, I can wear different hats: - debugging sessions together - discussing high level design of a project - talking broadly about a career
What’s been your favourite mentorship story so far? (optional)
It’s hard to decide, because I have lots of strong memories with all my mentees. If I have to pick one: I helped one mentee in the career transition from Data analyst to Data scientist.
Specifically, he went to a Google on site for a Data scientist role. In the end, he decided that graduate school was more important for him at his stage in life and he’s currently pursuing a Data science MSc at John Hopkins.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
I love talking with people from different backgrounds: such an enriching experience. I always learn something new from my mentees and that’s something I cherish. Plus, the feeling of helping others succeed in their careers is really amazing. I love thinking I made a big impact on someone’s life by just sharing what I went through when I was in the same situation.
Even if I am still a MSc student approaching graduation, I feel I have a lot of expertise thanks to my numerous internships, so I am here to share all of that and more!
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