A good start for the students' own mentorship program
News: Jun 01, 2011
IT-students at the University of Gothenburg decided to make a restart for the mentorship program at Lindholmen. The response from the IT companies was great and after a few weeks 25 students were assigned a mentor each who they can consult during the training.Being part of a mentoring program provides greater benefits than doing a job interviewIn April the kick-off for The Mentorship program at Lindholmen was held, and that was the first opportunity for the students to meet their new mentors. The Mentorship program has been launched this year by the students themselves, but has existed four-five years at Lindholmen. During 2010-2011 there were a great number of students in the program and the students decided to initiate their own mentor program to bring together mentors to all students that requested one. In March 2011 the students started to contact various companies and the response from the companies was great – after a few weeks 25 new mentors were joining the mentorship program.
The students point out that a mentor's personal attributes is the most important thing when looking at mentors, not the position the person has in the company. However, it has been essential to identify the area where the person works in, to get a good match against the students. Mentors have been asked to fill in a form where they could state if they work as programmers or system architects for example.
Helena Holmström Olsson started the kick-off with an introduction and a welcome speech and then it was time for students to meet their new mentors for the first time. Both students and mentors wore pieces of paper with different computations written on them, where the sum was the common denominator to find the student or mentor you were matched against. The search for the right computation led to many spontaneous conversations, because one had to get so close to the piece of paper to be able to read it, it would have been rude not to start talking to the person. The rest of the evening was devoted for getting to know your own mentor.
The mentor program has now been running for a few months and most students are very satisfied with their mentor. Typically the student and the mentor have a joint agreement to meet about once or twice a month. The companies represented in the mentoring program include Sigma, HiQ, EDB and Stratsys.
Students from the Mentorship program say that it seems to be the corporate culture and the management of the company which determines whether the companies are keen to be involved in mentorship programs. It is also about seeing tangible effects of the participation. One of the advantages is that they already two or three years in advance can see what kind of students they will be able to hire. There is also an opportunity for the companies to tell students about what courses they should take to match the labor market in the future.
"Being part of a mentoring program provides greater benefits than doing a job interview" says Anton Shumeika, student in the BSc program in Software Engineering. "You get someone who tells you which courses you should take. You also get the opportunity to get to know a specific company and how they are working, several years before you have completed your training. The result is a very short take-off distance if you then would be offered employment at the company for example – you can start working right away. "
Photographer: My Högblom
Contact Information
Catharina Jerkbrant, kommunikatör
IT Faculty, SE-412 96 Göteborg, SWEDEN
Visiting Address:
Lindholmsplatsen 1
Phone:
+46 (0)31 772 4898, +46 (0)766 18 27 48