What it’s like to be a ScholarX mentee — Part 1
ScholarX is a 3 month program initiated by Sustainable Education Foundation which offers free premium mentoring to Sri Lankan students like us during our study period. This program offers 6 mentors who are from leading universities and companies and we were given the opportunity to apply for this program and choose 3 mentors, where we will be assigned to one of the mentors we requested based on our application.
I am a second year engineering undergraduate at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and when I got to know about this program through this article, I thought to apply for this program as I myself am an ambitious girl seeking new opportunities, I believed reaching out to our very own Sri Lankans working at leading universities and companies would be very beneficial for me in my path to achieve my goals as they are experts in their own fields.
I should say I am fortunate enough to have been selected for this mentoring program out of 89 applicants. My mentor for this session is Mr. Sumudu Herath a Ph.D. Candidate at University of Cambridge and who also happens to be one of the best engineering undergraduates at my own university. I was looking forward to begin with this session, to get to know his experiences during his journey towards success. Our first session began by introducing ourselves to each other. From this session I observed that he was rather an outgoing character during his undergraduate years in university. Even though our fields of study are different I was mainly seeking guidance as to how I should balance my academic life with extra curricular activities in university and how I should develop my skills and how I should approach to be a good researcher in the future or a good employee in the industry in my fields of interest. He offered to help by sharing his experiences, achievements and expertises.
Since I’m left with only one year to develop my skills and polish my character to present my self in interviews for internships, I decided to spend my first session after the introduction, on this topic. From what he has observed, apart from the academic qualifications he emphasized the importance in the ability to work in a team since, in an internship interview they will mainly see whether we will be a potential employee to work in their team. Therefore, his advise was to give my maximum in team events in clubs and societies I’m in, and also in project work as well. He said, rather than being a leader we should be able to convince the employer that we are capable of working in a team. Also he pointed that, if I’m interested in being a researcher in leading universities, it would be beneficial if I could participate in a research prior to the internship interviews if possible, so that I would get an idea regarding the research world. He also mentioned that having contacts in my field of interest would be helpful in building up my network in the industry so, he offered to help me in contacting such people in our future sessions and also to provide tips on how to approach good supervisors for research. An interview for internship, an industrial job and an interview for applying for higher studies in universities will be different from one another, therefore, he advised that I should first observe what type of interview I’m getting myself into and then I should be able to prepare a CV (Curriculum Vitae) highlighting the points that would convince the employer that I’m the person for the job, rather than including every single life event in the CV. With all these advices, he didn’t forget to mention to enjoy undergraduate life as these few years will be the only years that we’ll have sufficient “free” time to have fun. :D
The tips I got from the first two sessions helped me realize certain points I haven’t thought about before, so I’m hoping to integrate them as much as possible to my undergraduate life and I hope these would be beneficial for the readers as well (specially undergraduates).
I’m a quiet girl who likes to mind my own business at all times, so I’m thankful for the SEF team to help youngsters like us reach out to the world. Looking forward for more valuable sessions like these in the coming weeks!
