Mentoring Scheme – Centre for Equity and Inclusion Sheffield

Mentoring Scheme

The Centre provides a bespoke mentoring scheme for postgraduate researchers of colour at the University of Sheffield.

Holistic Support

Postgraduate researchers will have the opportunity to discuss questions and concerns around the postgraduate programme, career development, institutional racism, and/or racial justice work, with those who have valuable expertise to share.

The scheme works as follows:

Each PGR will be paired with a staff member of colour
Both mentors and mentees will attend a mandatory training session to help them make the most of the mentoring experience.
Mentors and mentees will meet on a monthly basis over a period of 7 months
Training takes place in October and November 2023. Mentoring begins in January 2024.

Hearing my mentor's experiences was reassuring and helped to be kinder to myself when thinking I am lagging behind in my professional experience in academia.

The training provided was high quality and unique to the issues the scheme deals with.

I think it is really good for both the mentors and mentees to be engaged in schemes like this to create an academic space that is not competitive and brutal but comforting and supportive.

It reinforced in me my conviction to pursue a career in academia.

It is vitally important to have a scheme that tackles these issues and helps build mentees confidence and sense of belonging for their time at UoS and going on into their future careers

It has given me the tools to plan for the next steps with adequate resources.