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Next Year You Should Absolutely Adopt a Mentee in Data Science

And ten questions you should ask as you help them in their journey

Women In Data Science

Photo from Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels
Photo from Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels

In my first data engineering job, I didn’t consider mentoring anyone. I felt that I had nothing to offer anyone else. When I began my role as a data scientist, I spent the first 6 to 8 months learning from my mentors. I asked them tons of questions, threw ideas at them, and tried to understand what I wanted for my career progression. By the Fall of 2020, I received an email looking for anyone interested in mentoring Summer interns. After reading the email, I leaped and submitted my name. I was interested in mentoring young women interested in Data Science or software engineering. A few weeks went by, and I didn’t think anything of it until I got the email:

Thank you for signing up to be a Summer Mentor. Here are your assignments.

Why Mentor

So why did I start mentoring? The leap to start mentoring was to learn a new skill and assist someone younger in their career who may have questions. I remember starting in my current role and initially having problems that I didn’t know of whom to ask, and my mentors were the ones who helped answer those questions or guide me on how to find the answers myself. When I adopted my own two mentors, I began to open up to them about my career questions, advice, and feedback. This was when I realized I wanted to provide that same help to someone who may not know who to go for help. Mentoring does not have to be within your organization. Network with individuals both within and outside of your organization looking for a mentor to assist them.


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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.


Common Discussions

When I started to mentor, I wanted to help someone younger than myself as they navigated their career. As the meetings continued, I realized mentoring was something I wanted to continue doing to help others traverse their careers. Areas I found myself commonly talking with my mentee about included:

Career-Focused Questions

  1. How do you perceive the company and the industry?
  2. What are your thoughts on your current role? Are you enjoying the work you are doing? Do you find it too challenging or not challenging enough?
  3. What types of positions interest you? What type of contributor do you consider yourself to be? Research, technical, or management?
  4. How have you been looking for career opportunities? Have you tried different networking techniques, events, or job shadowing?

Learning-Focused Questions

  1. How has college been going for you? Are you facing any challenges that you would like to talk about?
  2. What were they looking to do after college? Are you interested in another degree, a bootcamp, or working?
  3. Are there any skills you are looking to learn? Maybe I can help provide you with resources that I am aware of.

Problem / Resolution

  1. Are you struggling with anything that you would like to discuss? We can discuss how to approach different situations.
  2. Do you feel you are getting the support you need from your colleagues and manager? If not, why are you feeling this way?
  3. Do you want to discuss what stressors you are facing at the moment? This engagement started after lockdown, so isolation, work-from-home, and more have been going on. I can be here to listen if you need someone to talk with.

Shadowing

As our relationship grew, I discussed how she could continue learning about STEM and data science with my mentee. One way that I highly recommend for any intern is to see if you can job shadow. Job shadowing is when you follow a particular employee through their day to day work to learn from them and see what they do. Whether it be attending someone’s meetings for a day or getting to spend a week on another team to see how they operate, job shadowing can be a valuable experience. I mentioned this to my mentee as she had never worked on a technical team before. The job shadowing experience would give her insight into how a technical team operates, what types of projects they work on, and typical meetings they attend to move projects forward. This was a valuable experience for her. She shadowed my team for a week, looked into how a data science team operates and understood the Agile methodologies we use to move our projects along.


Takeaways

The journey of mentoring has not been an easy one. It came with many lessons learned and took some getting used to. I began mentoring to gain another skill and reach out to younger individuals interested in STEM or data science. As I have continued these engagements, they have taught me so much about myself as well.

  • Take time to understand your career path. Where have you been, how have you gotten there, and what are your lessons learned? Reflecting on this journey will show you things you may have overlooked in the past. You will learn to articulate your successes and failures in how you navigated your career.
  • Mentoring is a valuable skill for leadership development that will help you learn how to actively listen to an individual, understand what they are telling or asking you, and then respond with a thoughtful answer.
  • Gain insight into how others are developing their career path and adapting to the challenges they face. Being a mentor can also teach you a lot about how others see those situations and tackle them. You can learn from them just as much as they are learning from you. Don’t let the relationship be one-sided.

Do you currently mentor someone interested in data science or STEM? What have you learned from this experience?


If you would like to read more, check out some of my other articles below!

5 Technical Behaviors I’ve Learned from 2 Years of Data Science and Engineering

15 Topics to Consider as You Review Code in Data Science

5 Leadership Behaviors I’ve Learned from 2 Years of Data Science and Engineering


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