Meeting 1 - Enhancing your presentation skills

Goal 1: Get to know each other

It is important that we use this first meeting to start building trust and a good relationship with the mentees. This goes beyond knowing their names, what they work on, and what they want to do in the future. Ask them about their hobbies, their families, and their lives. Share your story and encourage them to share theirs as well. Aim to inspire and be curious about their stories; engage with them.

Here are some ideas for icebreakers to get to know them better:

  • Use the whiteboard function on Zoom to ask them to anonymously write fun facts, and then the group will try to match a person with their fun fact (fun fact can be replaced by other things: hobbies, favorite band, guilty pleasure, useless talent, etc.).
  • Ask everyone to tell two truths and one lie. The others have to guess which statement is the lie.
  • Ask everyone to bring an object that is meaningful to them in some way and explain why it is significant.
  • Ask them to write down the three most important, funny, or shocking moments of their life.

Goal 2: Discuss practical aspects of your communication for the year

  • Determine the best way of communicating with each other: Email? WhatsApp? Slack? Discord?

  • Discuss mentors’ and mentees’ availability. This is the time to establish how much time you will be able to dedicate to your mentees. Will you be available to meet individually outside of the mandatory meetings if needed? How responsive will you be to emails and texts? Would you be able to review applications and documents if they send them to you? It is totally fine if you are committed only to the mandatory meetings we have planned; it is just important that they know what to expect.

  • What language will you use in your group?

Goal 3: Briefly go over the structure of the mentorship and understand what their interests are

Understand what they expect from you in the mentorship meetings:

  • The important thing here is to not only understand their general goals but also how, in practice, we can target them (e.g., the specific activities we can carry out during our meetings).
  • Idea 1: Use the following list of topic ideas. Ask them to rank them from most to least interesting and add new ideas that they might have. That will be useful to understand what they are most interested in discussing as a group.
    • How to prepare an application
    • How to choose a lab for a Master’s/PhD
    • Impostor Syndrome
    • Life as a PhD student
    • Living abroad: the good, the bad, and the ugly
    • How to focus during the pandemic - tips for productivity
    • How to reconcile academic and social life
    • How to use what we know to help others
    • The most important things I’ve learned in academia
    • How to be resilient
  • Idea 2: Ask them to write down three main goals for the meetings. Use the whiteboard function to list everything they say and work with them to turn these ideas into possible activities.

Goal 4: Go through the schedule and inform them about how the meetings are structured

Additional random ideas

  • Ask them to create a group name.
  • Ask them to express how they feel (at the beginning or the end of the session) with an emoji.
  • Use a roulette to make them talk about different ideas: https://wheeldecide.com/
  • Create interactive polls, word clouds, and Q&A with the websites (e.g., https://www.polleverywhere.com/ or https://www.mentimeter.com/ad/polling)