Our Mentorship Program

Our mentoring program is a chance for you to be matched one-on-one with one of our volunteer mentors. The program is designed to engage and provide support to students in the early stages of their evolutionary biology career who may be facing difficult barriers and obstacles to success, or who may just need someone to talk to for advice and perspective.

We do our best to match you with someone who has a similar background and/or similar field of study and interests, and we seek to ensure there is a common language you can both use comfortably. We have a database of mentors who we cross reference every mentee’s application with, and we then match you through email. Thereafter, it is up to you and your mentor to determine how often you want to chat, what about, and on what platform.

Our mentors

We have rounded up a diverse, passionate, experienced selection of evolutionary biologists at different stages of their career, and in an assortment of disciplines. Many of our mentors are also contributing members of other EvoBio Crash Course opportunities. They come from all over the world, and have a collective wealth of knowledge and experience that they are always looking to share.

Collaborative mentoring

When you become a mentee in our program, we also add you into our SLACK mentorship group, where other mentors and mentees can contact one another, or post interesting content, opportunities, and questions for group response.

What kind of topics do we address?

As you develop a stronger relationship with your mentor, you will likely become quite focused and specific in what you discuss. That being said, we do have some topics which are commonly brought up during the experience:

• The mentor’s own academic journey
• The mentees own academic goals (where you are now, your backstory, your academic, personal, and societal goals, your barriers and opportunities, your next steps, etc.)
• Where to find information about programs, scholarships, other opportunities
• Logistical components to consider, from finances to moving abroad to housing
• Building a network
• Making yourself a competitive applicant
• Addressing social, financial and political obstacles to your education
• Dealing with stress, anxiety, self confidence
• Handling external components of life that impact your academic life

And it goes on and on!

How to apply

Our mentorship program is entirely free, designed to help our students build a network, get advice from people with similar experiences, and to empower them with more knowledge, confidence, and opportunities than perhaps they had before being mentored. If you are interested in joining, please email us at evobio.crash.course@gmail.com with the following information:

• Full name
• Country of origin and country of current studies
• Field(s) of study
• Current education level and program
• Future goals for your evolutionary biology journey, immediate and/or future - what are your next steps (the main goal of our mentorship is to help you achieve this)
• Languages spoken and preferred language(s) of interaction
• What you hope to get out of the mentoring program
• Your preferred means of communication
• Any special requirements (for example, only being comfortable with a mentor who identifies as (or who does not identify as) a specific gender)

Upon applying

Our mentorship team will review your application and try to match you with an available mentor who is best fitting your profile. Sometimes you will be matched with someone who isn’t quite in the same specific field of study, but who’s experience, advice, and knowledge is expected to be both valuable and transferable to you.

For more information on our mentoring program, please download our Guide.