“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants ” — Sir Isaac Newton
Why should you start mentoring?
Here I’ll talk about me.. why do I mentor.. because what I have felt throughout my life is that although each person is unique.. we are not that different :)
So I started mentoring more from the perspective of giving back to the society and also because I did find it’s lack in my career and I strongly felt that having a mentor would have made me more confident and would have also put me on the right track earlier on. And now that I am mentoring, I do feel guilty that I’ve been receiving much more from this mentorship than I give it. It could be because I did not expect to get anything out of it .. it was more of a drive.. because during the initial days (years to be honest), I remember thinking “if only I knew this earlier, I would have done things better”. I knew I would have developed faster as a professional, had I some insight or some mentor to guide me. This was one of the main reasons I started mentoring and guiding students. Both on technical data science projects and in general about industry, about confidence, going about things. When you are a student, industry is an unknown factor.. and ‘knowing’ it before you enter, prepares one for many situations and helps tackle them confidently.
Now, I am a busy person and at any given point in time I have a few things to work on. There are a 100 things to do in life from the professional front and the personal front. It is a constant prioritisation activity. And most of the time there is a deadline and hence what needs to be done is what is deliverable. Many times it is what is right for the project and one cannot hog all the interesting work. Nor can I always find the opportunity to explore the latest algorithms in my projects itself. So a lot of personal exploration of the latest ideas gets left out. This was a problem I faced constantly and the solution to it was time — which I did not have much of.
When I initially started mentoring students, it started out with a way of inculcating the knowledge and bridging the industry-academy gap, while inculcating some confidence in them when they step out into the corporate world. Now, I love it when one solution solves two (or more) problems. I didn’t need to teach the students. There were many online courses that would do a much better job at it than me. What I had to give was an approach or a framework to solve data science problems. Based on their interests, I gave them topics which I was interested in but had no time to explore on my own. That would give them more real world problem solving experience and would solve my time issue too! I decided to learn through their time by giving a bit of mine to them.
Honestly, I thought this was a fantastic idea! It was a win-win for all. No one was giving more than what they were getting. If at all, I thought I was getting more out of this engagement. And what I’ve learned is that students have amazing grasping power. They have the motivation and the drive to learn something new. This, coupled with the fact that they would be looking for job offers within a year’s time, they put in a lot of extra effort, they have the thirst for learning, and more importantly, all the time in the world is all theirs. This is the best time for them to work on something cutting edge. Not only are their brains ripe to absorb knowledge and the fact that it would be a booster for their CV, I saw a change in their confidence in just a couple of months. They know they have done something worthwhile and they can talk about it to anyone. And the fact that I have some hand in it makes me feel very good about myself.
What started off as an experiment, turned out to be very valuable for the mentees as well but much more for me. Not only did my own concepts get reinforced, I was able to get back to the basics. And as they say you learn the best when you teach or have to explain it to someone. So a lot of my concepts got strengthened. I spoke about explorations in terms of the latest technologies, algorithms, that got left behind due to commitments. I was able to do those through the mentees.
I’ve had some other realisations too!
What I’ve realised is that I need not do everything on my own. I don’t have to do all the work. I don’t have to read all the papers, I don’t have to write all the code — writing the exploratory code, creating those algorithms, look at the outcomes, debug, write the paper at the end. I can take someone along this journey and what is really required is a direction and that is where I come in. So this has a 2-fold outcome — one is that the mentee gets to research on something latest and their confidence gets built up , they get mentored by industry experts and secondly I got to explore the topics I did not have time for and my confidence also got built up as a leader. I learnt to delegate things. I got to understand people dynamics how people work when something interests then and when something doesn’t. I’ve started to understand the early signs of when there may be trouble or the progress of a particular project is not as expected or reported.
I’ve learned to multi-task, to work on several projects at a time. To be able to context switch and still meaningfully contribute in all the projects that I am part of. This was very important to me.
How do you identify if someone needs a mentor?
People have potential and a mentor can help in bringing that out.
If you meet someone and you have a conversation with them and have ever wondered that this person has a lot of potential but for some reason they don’t seem to get there, it’s most likely, what they are lacking is a mentor.
A mentee is teachable, determined and full of potential.
How do you find a Mentor?
Connect with people.
Identify learning opportunities around you
Mistakes I made (in finding a mentor):
I assume the person wouldn’t be interested in talking to me after all the time is valuable and why would they want to waste it spending the time talking to me on things that I want to talk about I wanted more insights on . And I mentioned this to my mentor once and what he told me was quite simple: don’t decide on their behalf . so if you need help with something if you want someone to mentor you ask them, don’t make assumptions and most importantly, don’t make a decision on their behalf . I’m still quite apprehensive of asking for someone’s time. But I keep reminding myself not to make a decision on their behalf.
Also going by how I respond to messages that come to me on LinkedIn because most of the mentorship requests come in from there. One pattern that I’ve seen in myself is that I tend to reply and reply more promptly if there is a specific request. Of course one would start off with a “hi”, “hello”. But that is all that the message consists of and they are waiting for me to respond, that may not happen because I have no idea what they want to talk about. I am left wondering if they just want to keep a connection. And in general I cannot do short talk. I just don’t know how to and that becomes difficult for me to respond. On the other hand, if someone is out with their intention right away saying “hey, I’m so and so, and I’m seeking for guidance or mentorship or inputs on how to start my journey as a data scientist. Would you be able to help?” This gives me something to respond with and I am more likely to revert.
How do you keep a Mentor?/ Tips for a mentee:
Respect the mentor’s time. Remember, they could be spending this time with their family, friends, doing their hobby, etc.
Come with relevant topics and questions
Tips for a mentor:
Goal should be what the mentee wants to learn. Not what you want to teach.
Understand their goals.
They decide the goal. You help in giving direction.
Mentor needs patience. Mentor should give encouragement.
Give corrections. Be kind while doing it.
Types of mentorship:
There are 2 types of mentorship at least in my view. One is more technically oriented and the other is more personally oriented. When I say technically oriented I mean you are guiding them in their career and topics that you’ve mastered in or have a fair bit of knowledge on. While mentoring on the personal front is more about inculcating confidence and it is also a little more personal because it more often involves sharing personal experiences and mistakes.
Do I need to become the wise Yoda (an old figure with lots of wisdom attained through years of experiences) before I mentor someone?
You can become a mentor at any stage of your life or career. The whole point is to help someone through your experiences. If you are a university student, you can mentor a junior college student. If you have just joined the industry you can mentor the previous two. If you have been in the industry for quite some time, you can mentor all the three mentioned earlier. If you decide to start your own company, you can seek a mentor. And as a mentee, so not shy away. Don’t be scared or fearful. Just ask! At the most they may not be able to mentor you. And most of the time the constraint is time. So it’s okay. Respect that and ask someone else. But it is very rare that a mentor will approach you. The mentor mentee relationship is driven by the mentee.
Sharing failures:
What I’ve realised is sharing failures and mistakes is something that helps in relating more to the other person (the mentor) as a human being rather than someone who is an expert and who has achieved so much in their life. This also takes courage on part of the mentor to be comfortable to share these failures and experiences.
Mentee: Your journey seems very interesting, would you elaborate on it and what were your challenges.
Me (to myself): I have never evaluated myself. I do my yearly reviews. What I have achieved, what I want to achieve, what do I need to do to get to what I want to achieve. I never really reflected what challenges I have faced in my career.
Me: <Starts to describe my journey> almost became a doctor! <wow, life would be so different, had I been able to attend Imperial college> family shifted back to India — didn’t want to wait a year for admissions — I liked math and all the sciences equally. I was OK not being a doc — took admission in computer science — became an electronics and telecommunications engineer <at least I realised computers was not all I wanted to do, but I did like the AI subject> — joined a company as a business analyst (work profile of a data scientist) — was sure I wanted to pursue ML and AI and so did my Masters in the same — was going to join companies in the same field, but ended up joining Thoughtworks as a Developer! Why? I liked the company’s culture. Thought wouldn’t hurt to try programming for a year or two. Tried to switch back to data science in a company that had no role as a data scientist, but there were several indications that we would get some projects in the same. So I stuck around. Did some PoCs. Took some sessions in data science and ML. Taught data science to folks in the company. And that was a long time back. Now I’m happy doing what I do J
That was a short version of my journey! And I realised I still hadn’t answered her question.. what was my biggest challenge? After some consideration and going through a few incidents in my head:
Me: My biggest challenge was accepting that I was mediocre at software programming. And this was quite a challenge because until then I excelled at anything I picked up. Even literature! And languages were never my strong suit.
I was aware that I was much better at data science than I was at creating software applications. Never thought I would state it as a challenge.
And on other occasions it adds to your (the mentors) confidence:
For example, a conversation with one of my mentees from Africa who is trying to start a data science community in her area:
Her: You have achieved so much in life. How did you manage all of this?
Me: (scratching my head & thinking to myself — I have?)
Me: Well, I did not do them all parallelly. These are things that have happened over the years. Most of them one after the other. I picked something and finished it.
I realised here that I was uncovering things about myself. Pick something and finish it.. (I look at the stack of half done paintings and prepared canvases next to my study.. finishing it is the trick!) A nice little piece of advice I should continue to follow myself.
I thought this was a little like duck programming. You don’t really need the duck there, but talking to it helps uncover the solution yourself.
I guess just telling someone that you also made mistakes and you still survived is also enough to give them confidence to sustain in their pursuit. And if nothing else I felt useful, I was being useful to another human being. This was very important for me because being a professional in the industry I did not see my work directly having an impact on people or improving the quality of life. This was a way for me to feel worthy. And everyone involved benefits — it’s a win-win situation!
Well, this was my experience and thoughts around mentoring. Do you agree? Disagree? Do let me know your thoughts.
