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Sign up to become a mentor of the SSI Learning to Code mentorship programme

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Selina Aragon

Selina Aragon

Associate Director of Operations

Posted on 27 February 2023

Estimated read time: 3 min
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Sign up to become a mentor of the SSI Learning to Code mentorship programme

Posted by d.barclay on 27 February 2023 - 12:00pm a computer and notebook on a deskPhoto by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

The Software Sustainability Institute is looking for volunteers for our next Research Software Camp to mentor beginners who code in academia as part of its mentorship programme. Volunteers will ideally identify as Research Software Engineers, even if that’s not their current job title. 

Sign up to become a mentor before 20 March.

What to expect

The mentorship programme will run from 24 April to 26 June 2023 (8 weeks). We will hold a Launch event on Monday 24 April 2023 to mark the start of the mentorship. We will also have an information session for mentors, where we will set expectations and offer guidance around the process. At the end of the mentorship, we'll run an event to allow mentees to present their projects.

We ask mentors to commit to 1 hour every week to support their mentees as they undertake their projects from 24 April to 26 June 2023 (eight weeks), around 1 hour in total for both the information session and the Launch event, and a one-hour event for reflections at the end of the mentorship event. 

Why become a mentor?

In a tweet, one of our previous mentors quoted Richard Feynman: “If you want to master something, teach it.“ 

Mentoring challenges not only how you perceive your current skills and knowledge but also how you explain concepts or skills to help develop and motivate others. Becoming a mentor will help you expand your skill set, take an active role in the uptake of good research software practices and contribute to forming future RSEs.

About the mentorship programme

We ran the first Learning to Code mentorship programme in November 2021 as part of the Research Software Camp: Beyond the Spreadsheet. The aims of the mentorship are to improve the coding skills of beginner learners and provide hands-on help and support post-training to develop specific computational skills. Over the course of two months, volunteer mentors guide volunteer researchers to help them learn a programming language of their choice and explore various ways of developing their computational skills.

Our spring Research Software Camp will be held from 19 to 30 June 2023. 

For questions,  email Selina Aragon, Research Software Camp Chair, at s.aragon@software.ac.uk.

 

Sign up to become a mentor before 20 March.

 

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