In tandem towards a career in the scientific field

August 23, 2012, Nr. 58

University of Stuttgart starts mentoring programme for female Bachelor students

Creating a system of two-cycle programmes in the course of the Bologna Reform and the change processes in the university system associated with this offers opportunities to introduce innovations, also in the promotion of your talent. In order to make a scientific career appealing for highly qualified young women and to guarantee that the female students are supported continuously and at an early stage, the University of Stuttgart is now starting a special mentoring programme for female Bachelor students. After the orientation test the programme that goes by the name of “jumeta“ (Junior Mentoring Tandem) offers female students an innovative bridge between the basics taught in the study course and their subsequent career as scientists. Interested parties can download the application documents immediately from the web address www.uni-stuttgart.de/jumeta .

As a result of a combination of funding modules, unique in Germany up to now, the female students are taught important know-how on the structures and processes in the scientific enterprise and can expand their contact network. The basics of the programme are mentoring tandems whereby each female doctoral student supports a female Bachelor student as a junior mentor for a whole year, offering her advice and assistance, advising her in planning her career and supporting her in developing her skills. As a special feature of the Stuttgart mentoring programme, this one to one support is supplemented by group mentoring by ”established“ female professors from the University of Stuttgart. Other components are workshops to acquire key qualifications as well as diverse possibilities in order to make contacts at an early stage that are useful for career advancement.

“Decisive for the success of the tandem is that the development and learning targets of the mentees and the support possibilities of the mentors resp. the groups match perfectly“, explained the managing director of mentoring at the University of Stuttgart, Regina Rapp. That is why the university attaches great importance to so-called “matching“, whereby pairs are carefully created on the basis of profiling sheets and individual discussions.

The mentees are introduced in depth to the mentoring in workshops and individual discussions and are given credit points for participating in “jumeta“, which are creditable as interdisciplinary academic achievements. The female doctoral students in turn are prepared for their important task by taking a training course. Many of today’s junior mentors themselves participated as mentees in the ”classic“ mentoring programme at the University of Stuttgart and are now pleased to pass on their experiences to talented and committed female students. The mentoring programme up to now, which is mainly geared to junior scientists from the University of Stuttgart and in which around 250 young women have participated successfully since it was founded in 2004, is to be supplemented with jumeta by a target group of female Bachelor students and in this way already guarantees continuous support from the Bachelor course to the Master course up to the start of doctoral studies.

Your contact person:
Regina Rapp, Managing Director Mentoring Programme for Women in Science and Research,
tel. 0711/685-84127, email: jumeta (at) uni.stuttgart.de

Dr. Hans-Herwig Geyer, University Communication at the University of Stuttgart, tel. 0711/685-82555,
email: hans-herwig.geyer (at) hkom.uni-stuttgart.de

 

“jumeta“, the new mentoring programme for female Bachelor students at the University of Stuttgart, helps young women to embark on a career in the field of science. (Photo: University of Stuttgart
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