The idea is to encourage PhD students to seek out their own mentoring relationships with someone outside of their lab group. A mentor is somebody who has your best interests at heart, but your best interests have to be mutually exclusive from their best interests!! Rather than setting up forced pairs of mentors, we want to encourage PhD students to find the right kind of mentor for them, as this is a skill that they will need to develop throughout their careers.

Whether you only meet with a Postdoc for a one-off coffee, or it turns into a regular thing, it’s entirely up to you and your mentor.

The student’s role and responsibilities:

1. Reach out to a possible mentor via email based on the list of ‘mentor profiles’
2. The student is responsible for arranging the meetings
3. Your mentor is not a supervisor, in the sense of project planning and experimental design. It is the student’s responsibility to use the mentoring relationship appropriately.

The mentor’s role and responsibilities:

1. If contacted, be willing to meet the student at least once informally (e.g ~30min over coffee)
2. The mentor can decline future meetings at their own discretion
3. The mentor can decline further mentees if they already have too many
4. The mentor will keep anything discussed in the meeting completely confidential, unless it is deemed necessary to break confidentiality in the interests of the student’s health & safety. In this case, the point of contact is Scientific Training (Eva Schmid).

• If you are interested please register at the following password (contact website adrmin. for this) protected page, here.