ScholarX Diaries 01- My Journey as a mentee & the best way to track your progress.
This is the first blog to share my last 2 months experiences as a mentee in the ScholarX program 2021. It a 6-month program for Sri-Lankan undergraduates who would like to get free premium mentoring during their study period. I was very happy when I received the confirmation mail from the Sustainable Education Foundation(SEF). My mentor was Ms. Asara Senaratne, who is a PhD Candidate at Australian National University.
I will explain how I have tracked my progress over the past 2 months in this program. I hope this will help other mentees to monitor their progress and maintain continuous and clear communication with mentors.
I had the first introductory meeting with the mentor on 7th May. That was a group call with 3 of other mentees. We introduced our selves and getting to know each. I have listed down my goals to be achieved from this program in a google sheet and shared with my mentor. My major goal was to get the guidance for the final year research project and I had some other minor goals to success my career.
I have shared that sheet with my mentor and I have updated goals when I have achieved the sub goals.
Officially the program was started from15th of May 2021. The first individual meeting with the mentor was on 19th of May. From that week I had continuous weekly meetings with the mentor. I have used another google sheet to track the progress of tasks that I have done in each week. My mentor review and discuss the previous week tasks and assign me new tasks in weekly meetings. Here is the structure of that google sheet used track my weekly tasks .
This methods make the communication between me and the mentor more easier. It has the list of tasks to be completed in each week, time period of the tasks, status of the task and I added my completed works to the other Notes column. Most of the time I have shared my completed tasks few days before the weekly meeting. When there are tasks to be documented I used google docs and I have shared GitHub source codes when there is an development based tasks. I have used the skype messaging to ask any question from the mentor.
Those are the tracking tools I used as a mentee for a better communication with the mentor. I hope that all other mentees in the ScholarX program can get an idea to track their tasks and goals.
I want to thank Sustainable Education foundation to giving me such amazing opportunity. ScholarX is very helpful mentoring program for the success of my academics.
I am so thankful to my mentor Ms. Asara Senaratne, for mentoring me throughout this program. Although she is busy with works, she never missed the weekly meetings and guide me to achieve my goals. I am pretty sure I can achieve all my planned goals at the end of this mentoring period with the help and guidance of my mentor.
This is a short blog post but it will be useful for anyone who wants to organize their goals and tasks. I hope to share the full research work experience in the next blog post in the near future.
Thanks for reading my blog . Let’s meet in another interesting and useful blog article. Cheers…🥂
