Scientific community
Creating a community for the Sci.STEPS scientific mentorship program
Supporting young scientists
Sci.STEP scientific mentorship program is a mentoring program for undergraduates, graduates, and young scientists looking to build their lives and careers consciously, find desired positions in academia and industry, and become confident in the application process. The program was launched in 2022.
Joining the team
The co-founders of Sci.STEPS invited the Warenje Team to build the scientific community for participating mentors and mentees to facilitate interaction between all participants of the program. One of the long-term goals of this community is to create a sustainable and thriving scientific community with a horizontal hierarchy. A scientific community is needed to foster collaboration, peer review, and knowledge sharing among researchers, leading to the advancement of scientific understanding, innovation, and the ability to address complex challenges facing society.
Step-by-step support
The Warenje Team joined the project as external consultants, guiding scientific community organization and realization. Warenje helped the Sci.STEPS team to set the mission of the scientific community, its building structure, means of communication, governance, intermediate and final KPIs, and other aspects. By the end of the first season (Spring 2023) of the program, all set KPIs were outperformed, most importantly, the ones that were community-driven.
Sustainable community
The Sci.STEPS mentorship program successfully finished its first season in Spring 2023. During several months of the program 80% of mentors and 90% of mentees joined the community platform, ten community-driven channels were created and maintained, four language clubs were created. The built scientific community continues to live after the first season of the program is officially finished. Community members continue to set up talks and language clubs, they share networking opportunities, give advice to the members during position applications, provide peer-to-peer support when it comes to the internal wellbeing of the members, and work on creating an Aluimni network.
Dr. Evgeniya Vorobyeva
Sci.STEPS co-founder
Olya joined our core team on a very early stage with an idea of establishing community in the mentorship program that we envisioned to create. At that moment I had no idea how it is going to look and what would it become - I just trusted my instinct about Olya's experience and expertise.
We had a phase of planing - Olya guided us to select an online platform that comfortable for us and proposed the structure of the channels on it. She also set the goals, vision and mission for the community and performed the mid-term and final analytical analysis to track the KPIs. During the cycle of our mentoring program, the community was blooming - participants were exchanging opinions, struggles, achievements and supported each other. Many new activities were born by the participants themselves: 4 speaking clubs (the English speaking club exists up to now, 4 months after the program finish!), and a series of lectures.
According to questionnaires, the network opportunities and experience of other mentors and mentees were the most valuable things on our program. All of this would not be possible without the community. I want to mention the Olya's attitude and and communication skills. It is always a pleasure to talk to her, the whole team and I felt being heard and understood. She establishes open and comfortable dialogue and looks for the best solution for everyone. We will continue to work with her and I can only recommend Warenje for your company!
The Warenje team helps to organize sustainable scientific communities, such as alumni networks, Ph.D., and postdoc networks, peer networks and many others.