Next Year You Should Absolutely Adopt a Mentee in Data Science
By: Rose Day
Tags: Leadership, Mentorship, Leading Women In Data, Women In Tech, Data Science

Your Path and Lessons Learned

My first few sessions of mentoring were anxiety-riddled. The program paired me with a business intern interested in STEM, but I had never mentored anyone before. This internship was her first job in college, and she had started taking computer science courses. Going into this engagement, I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Before meeting her, I reached out to my mentors for advice as I started this journey and received valuable feedback:

Your career is your journey. You have had failures and successes; you have traversed different situations and worked with various people. When you are mentoring, this is your time to share your unique perspective. As they bring up topics to discuss or problems, they are facing, you can share how you have handled similar situations. Your experiences, both good and bad, can help them as they are navigating these areas.

I took that advice and scheduled our first 1:1. She came to the meeting and discussed with me an issue she was struggling with. She had been with the company for a few weeks now, and she felt that she was not being given enough work to do in her internship, so she had a lot of free time. The first thing I did was listen. I wanted to understand how she felt about the situation, what steps she had taken to resolve this, and anything else she wanted to discuss. Listening is the best place you can start to allow your mentee the freedom to express their thoughts on the situation.

When she was done, I offered her my perspective on the situation. I shared my own experiences in feeling like I did not have enough work to do in past jobs that I held. We discussed how I tackled the problem and ways to approach her manager or other teammates to resolve the matter. When I faced this issue, I went to my manager and other teammates. I asked to become involved in more projects that I was interested in and advocated for myself to be put into more leadership roles when possible. In sharing my experiences with her and providing advice on how she can handle the problem, she was able to go back to her team and manager to ask for more things to work on that would help her feel like she was providing value to the team.

As we continued meeting, her Summer internship turned into a co-op, and we kept our mentor-mentee relationship into the Fall. Continuing these meetings, I developed a useful pattern for our discussions:

Ask what do you need from me this week. Did she want to discuss a specific topic, go over a problem she was having, or ask any questions? I wanted her to feel comfortable asking or talking about the challenges she was facing both at work and school Actively listen. At this point, she has chosen a topic to discuss, and I want to hear what she has to say. I would stay quiet and let her have her time to flow down the information. If I had any questions to clarify, I would ask and then let her continue. Share experiences and lessons learned. After listening to her and making sure I understood the topic of discussion, this is where I would begin to talk. I would share with her lessons I have learned in my career, discuss how I would approach a particular situation, or open a discussion to problem solve with her as she thought through the issue. Recap. Recap what you discussed, write down any next steps that came out of the engagement, and plan the next session.

This is a format I have continued to hold with my mentee discussions and have started to implement in meetings with my mentors. For myself, it has allowed me to have targeted, focused talks with individuals during steps 1 and 2, listen to their feedback while taking down notes to reference later in step 3, and reflect on the overall conversation at the end and later on in step 4. Not only has mentoring provided value to my mentee, but it has taught me a lot about myself and how I approach different situations.