My six month mentorship program through WEST
Having a mentor can be life changing, but how do you get one and is it really worth it? In the past year I was fortunate to form a mentorship relationship with an awesome woman in technology, Mikell Taylor. Mikell is a Technical Program Manager at Amazon Robotics with many years of experience. The mentorship opportunity came through the WEST Program and lasted for around six months and we still stay in touch! In this post, I want to provide an overview of the program for people interested in trying WEST and looking for an insider’s perspective as well as get a chance to self reflect on my experience.
I was looking for a mentor to help me reach the next step in my career and I was stuck about how to find the right person. Then came She Geeks Out. In their October 2018 newsletter, they advertised the WEST mentorship, acronym for Women Engineers Stay in Tech. This is a program that pairs women engineers to more senior people in technology for a mentorship relationship.
I thought that sounded great, so I spent around 15 minutes to apply to the program through their online portal. Within a few weeks, I heard back from them that I had been accepted. The cost was around $1500 for the whole six months. If cost is a concern, they help you get your company to subsidize the cost by providing custom emails you can send to your manager. That worked for me and I secured complete funding through my company.
The first step was the onboarding event. That consisted of a one hour onboarding session to set up the expectations for the program.
The mentors are mid to late career professionals interested in helping you develop skills and achieve your goals.
In terms of your relationship with your mentor: be honest and transparent, and accept that this is a mutual learning experience.
The program is centered around confidentiality. Some communication is sent back for general improvement of the program but at its core the communication is private between the mentee and mentor.
The expectation is to spend 1 hour every two weeks or at a frequency of your choosing chatting with each other.
Then I completed my profile online and set up some personal goals.
My goals at the beginning of the program:
Being more strategic about my career.
Mapping my career.
Drive excellent results.
I am not sure (yeah, that was an option)
In addition to my broader direction goals, I also picked two general areas I would like to work on with my mentor. Before this exercise, I had a very vague notion of what I wanted to be working on, so being forced to pick something more specific was illuminating.
Career planning
Develop a concrete vision for my career
Strategize my next career move
Personal Brand
Determine my unique value proposition
Improve or change my reputation
Promote my value within the organization
Then, I got paired with my mentor, Mikell! Mikell has a very strong technical background in robotics, management and mentoring folks as well as being an amazing professional woman in technology. Often by virtue of being the most senior woman around, she has fallen into the role of mentoring the other women around as well!
I met with Mikell regularly over our mentorship and around a year later, I have a much more concrete idea about all my goals than I did at the very beginning. To me that is one of the most valuable benefits of a good mentorship experience, gaining clarity on your goals and also acting on them because of the accountability enforced by the mentorship. So, here are a few more details for my specific goals:
Career planning
Develop a concrete vision for my career: After four years of being a professional software engineer, I have a higher level mission that I can truly identify with: I want to make the world a better place by working on interesting software problems with awesome people. More specifically, I want to help make the world a better place by building powerful big data infrastructure to help companies make better business decisions that lead to a better world.
Strategize my next career move: A few things fell into this category. I sought out and worked on more critical and client driven projects at my company for some of our biggest customers. I also spent more time talking to folks from support about what matters and I set myself up to work on a bigger project that would lead to a promotion. By the end of the year, I did get put up for a promotion, so yay for that!
In that category, I also spent a lot more time understanding what drives me personally. The answer to that is empathy for the end user as well as intellectual curiosity and alignment with my personal goals.
Personal Brand
Improve my reputation
I gave a 1 hour lecture at the Database Class at Brandeis University, which ultimately resulted in my company recruiting one of our summer interns, so yay for that.
This last November, I gave another lecture at the Database Class at Boston University, I felt a lot more comfortable after that second lecture than the first one.
I created my own website, kept my blog up to date, and published 5 posts in 2019! Among the posts were a total of 2 podcast style interviews. It had been my dream to get started with podcasting and it finally happened! My website has around ~1500 views right now and I never thought I would get above 100.
Along those lines I doubled my twitter follower count from ~174 to ~ 350! I have gotten to know a lot of interesting people in the world of technology through Twitter and keeping up with conferences and new tech articles of people I follow is a lot easier.
Promote my value within the organization
I worked on critical features for big customers at my company.
I chaired the patent committee of my company to promote inventions and innovation and also filed a patent for one of my interesting features of the year. I also got one of my patents granted – https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190179930A1/en
Finally, I gave two one hour talks within the company promoting my own work, that had a broad reach in the company as well as several white board talks for my own team and other engineers and received amazing feedback on those. One of my co-workers mentioned that my talks are some of the most engaging they have attended!
Overall, I loved having a mentor and Mikell was absolutely awesome, encouraging and overall inspiring and I would highly recommend WEST!
Short Timeline of WEST
10/02/2018: Heard about WEST from the She Geeks Out mailing list and applied online the same day.
10/12/2018: Heard back that I have a spot and can purchase the program online from Heidi, the WEST founder.
10/20/2018: Asked for funding from my company and got approved.
10/26/2018: Meeting one one one with an advisor to assign mentors in the program.
11/06/2018: Getting matched with a mentor
11/20/2018: Kickoff call with my mentor, that lasted around one hour. We talked about our stories a bit and shared goals. We also scheduled to have lunch in the first week of December.
Meet with your mentor once-twice a month for the next six months.