What is mentoring?
Mentorship is a relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The mentor may be older or younger than the person being mentored (the mentee), but they must have a certain area of expertise. It’s always the volunteering of both sides which strengthen this bond. Some person might be a mentor to someone and also being a mentee of someone at the same time. A person may not be restricted to only have a single mentor throughout his/her life. The first mentors we meet is our own parents. From there onwards, we meet various mentors to guide us through the journey of life.
Why mentoring is important?
Mentoring allows a person to boost his/her career. Mentoring can be seen as a shortcut to success. Why should we fall on the same pit which someone else has fallen before and in the same debate, why shouldn’t we apply the path to success which someone else has already been succeeded. In other hand, being a good mentor to a mentee has benefits too. It helps someone to develop the skill of influencing, motivating and out of all, the most important which is the happiness by helping out someone.
This is a message by Winston Churchill to all the great mentors out there who are helping others to succeed,
“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give”
ScholarX program by Sustainable Education Foundation (SEF)
To start off, this is what the SEF Global tells about its mentoring program in a nutshell,
“ScholarX is an exclusive 6-month program aimed at providing mentoring support to a selected pool of high Potential undergraduate students based in Sri Lanka ideally by a Sri Lankan expat currently engaged with one of the world’s top universities or Fortune 500 companies. It’s our free premium mentoring platform by Sri Lankans for Sri Lankans working towards creating a culture of knowledge and expertise sharing without the limitation of geographical borders.” – SEF Global
ScholarX program helps undergraduates in Sri Lanka to provide them with free premium mentorship from the successful people in the world of academics and business. The ScholarX 2019 program was a huge success which inspired me to apply for the this year program. This time in ScholarX 2020, there was a great collection of mentors covering almost all the areas considering every undergraduate. An interview process is done to filter out applicants and to match the mentors with the mentees. For more information about the ScholarX program visit, https://sefglobal.org/scholarx/2020/
Why I needed mentoring
For the readers who are reading my articles for the first time, I would like to say a bit about me. I’m a passionate individual who likes to face new challenges, adapt to new opportunities and more over likes to challenge myself out from my comfort zone. I have a been a very studios person since my childhood focusing more on academics which resulted in achieving good results in A/L exams as well as my current Electronics and Telecommunication engineering degree at University of Moratuwa. I’m passionate more into robotics and computer algorithms. These days I’m trying myself out in the vast world of entrepreneurship in the journey of building the dream team.
As I always like to find new opportunities, I always needed help from the people who can provide guidance and support in different areas of life; academics, career, lifestyle, personal growth and etc. These guidance not only help to avoid the roadblocks in life but also to discover new areas hidden unseen.
My Mentor
As I love to learn about computer algorithms and to participate in competitive programming competitions my first choice was Mr. Chethiya Abeysinghe who is currently a software engineer at Google. I would like to really express my gratitude towards ScholarX program for the opportunity to get connected with him. He’s also an alumina of our own department who has excelled in computer algorithms field. His team won the iEEEXtreme world championship once. Also, he has won several awards at International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). He has done several webinars on programming and algorithms along with Sustainable Education Foundation (SEF Global). Here is our amazing mentoring group mentored by Mr.Chethiya Abeysinghe.
The journey so far...
Our first challenge was to setup a time for the group mentoring sessions which we have scheduled at 5 am weekly at a weekend day. Waking up in the morning always been a challenge to me. I never go to university morning lectures on time, but I didn’t miss a single mentoring session till now which really helped to move one step further in time management. The sessions are always friendly and welcoming. Here, I learned the importance of computer algorithms, coding interviews and knowledge about technology which I’m planning to cover in the upcoming articles in this series of articles about the ScholarX program. It’s almost two months passed in the 6-month period. Hope to learn more and unlock new areas in life with the time.
This brings an end to this articles. Please add any comments or suggestions to improve my articles.
Stay tuned for more articles like this in the future!
