The mentoring scheme started in the academic year 2018/2019 and was aimed at final year women and gender minority undergraduate or MSc students who were paired with a current PhD student as support for decisions about further studies or PhD. Throughout the pandemic lockdowns the programme disappeared, but it was brought back briefly in the academic year 2022/2023. The programme is now being revived and extended. Our mentors span across the PhD, post doc and academic community, and we opened the programme for all minority students. We will continue having fortnightly lunches to create a community amongst us. These lunches are open to people outside the mentoring scheme, too. We have also created this website so that interested people can access all the information whenever they wish. Especially the Resources tab might be of interest.
We aim to create a sense of community right from the start. In order to address the leaky progression pipeline from UG/MSc to PhD and beyond, we are currently working on extending the programme even further. Our aim for the next academic year is to have final year UG or MSc students volunteer as mentors for 1st year students, and to find mentors for the PhD students and post docs as part of enhancing our early career support.
April '23 Well done to Holly for presenting her PhD work at the BAMC and best of luck for her presentation at the OpenFOAM Workshop in Genoa in June.
March '23 Big congratulations to Ugne for presenting her summer project at the undergrad conference at UoM and winning 3rd price!
March '23 Georgia has been asked to do a talk at a mini symposium at the biennial numerical analysis conference this summer (spectral methods and orthogonal polynomials) . Further congratulations to her for submitting her first paper!
Feb. '23 A huge congratulations to Eleanor who who has received a grant from the MS Society to research the transfer of MS medications during pregnancy. More info here . She will be dividing her time between the maths department and the hospital.
Nov. '22 Anja has been invited to present her research in group cohomology at a general maths seminar at the Royal Holloway Univeristy London!
Sept '22 All the best to Alexandra who joined the committee of the MathSoc as organiser of the Galois lectures!
Diana (mentee): Wanted to say a massive thank you for coordinating this and putting me in touch with Eleanor. She was a massive help this year and very nice and understanding. It was great to have someone that has been through a similar academic pathway and I really appreciate it!
Ugne (mentee): I'm glad this scheme exists here in Manchester and would recommend any woman or non-binary person interested in research sign up. And my mentor Jess is great! She is supportive and enthusiastic but also down-to-earth. So I can go to her for career advice or when I'm anxious about assignments or a module. I feel that participating in this scheme helped to reassure me that it's nothing unnatural for a woman to pursue mathematics.
Alexandra (mentee): Being part of this scheme has been a great experience, as it provided me with the opportunity to interact with lecturers, professors, and Ph.D. students to discuss research areas and my Mathematical progress. I find it very fulfilling to be able to connect with them in this way.
Alice (former mentee, now PhD student at UoM): I had Sunny for a mentor while I was doing my masters and it was so nice to be able to talk to someone who had recently been through the process. What I found really helpful was being able to ask Sunny “silly” questions that I wouldn’t want to ask a lecturer and just get a sense of wat PhD life was like. It made the process of applying for a PhD a lot less daunting and mysterious!
Jess (mentor): I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting other people within the department via the lunches, impromptu coffees and through mentorship. The scheme has generated a wonderful sense of community and it had been one of the most valuable parts of my journey as a postdoctoral researcher. Despite being a mentor, I feel like I have learned a huge amount from chatting with other members of the society and have also gained some great friends and colleagues in the process. Whether you want to join as a mentor or mentee, I would highly recommend joining or chatting to current members to find out more about the scheme.
Holly (mentor): I’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity this year to be a wgm mentor for an undergraduate student here at the University of Manchester. I hope that through this mentoring scheme my mentee has felt supported in their journey and now has a better understanding of the lifestyle, opportunities and careers as a wgm member of the STEM community. Being able to give advice through examples of my personal experience has been invaluable and reminds me how far I’ve come throughout my career. I’ve learned so much being in this role and I hope that I can apply these skills in future roles, after my PhD