Support through Mentoring

Dr Alessia Platania

Especially at the beginning of their scientific careers, researchers face many questions that others have also asked themselves at some point. To promote a helpful exchange of experiences, Heidelberg Alumni International also offers research mentoring as part of its mentoring programme: This is open to all academics seeking advice on topics such as doctoral studies, research abroad, research funding or cooperation, peer reviewing, networking and more. In this way, doctoral students and other young researchers can benefit as mentees from the expertise of experienced colleagues who provide them with advice and support as mentors.

Since a research career is as rewarding and exciting as demanding and frustrating, having mentors is extremely important, emphasises Dr Alessia Platania, the first research mentor of the HAI network. The 32-year-old physicist from Italy was a postdoctoral researcher and Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University from 2017 to 2020 and is currently conducting research at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, while completing her habilitation in Italy. “I had great mentors during some parts of my research career to date, and I am grateful for that, but I wish this would not have had discontinuities”, she explains. “Given the importance I attribute to mentoring, I decided to share the knowledge and experience that I gathered, and to become a mentor myself.”

Among other topics, Alessia Platania offers advice on writing reports, articles and successful research proposals, on giving lectures and seminars, or on how to handle job interviews. “Of course, my experience is based on my research career in Theoretical Physics, but I am confident that many of the things I learned in the past years extend to other research fields, in particular those falling under the label of natural science.” By now, other network members with a wide variety of professional backgrounds, who come from Germany, but also from countries such as Mexico or Canada, also offer mentoring in the field of research via the HAInet online platform.

Everyone who would like to be available as a mentor can create a mentor profile on HAInet, stating personal and professional background as well as the fields of counselling that result from this experience. Based on these profiles, potential mentees, as registered HAI members and with access to HAInet, can get a first impression and then contact their chosen mentors themselves. The mentors receive the contact request by email and decide individually whether the specific mentoring request matches their experience. The HAI team is happy to assist in the search for suitable mentors and in matching the pairs.