YES!

We hope to identify mentors for mentees within one week. 

Please visit our Resources page to learn more about other great mentoring programs.

Sorry, we don’t have the expertise to help you.

We are principally focused on students applying to graduate programs in the United States, and to those attending US institutions. However, if we have the capacity to support international students applying to program in North America, as well as US students applying to programs outside the US, then this we are glad to make those pairings. The reason for this geographic focus is simply that is our wheelhouse, and ES graduate programs in the US, are different enough than outside the US that we would expect to have some difficulty finding expertise in our mentor pool.

There are a lot of undergraduates (and graduate students) who don’t have enough access to the kind of support that they need and deserve to launch well into a graduate program. Many universities (especially regional public universities and low-endowment colleges and universities, often principally serving students from groups underrepresented in ES) lack the resources to provide quality mentorship to all of their undergraduates. There are many faculty, grad students, postdocs, and others that would like to help diversify ES, and we would like to connect the demand of students for mentorship with the supply of mentors.

We would like to help all students who feel that they need support in writing fellowship applications and throughout the process of applying to graduate school. You don’t need to be a member of any particular category. As our mission is to improve access and equity in graduate programs, we prioritize making connections for students with identities that have been minoritized in our discipline. If we have a shortage of mentors who volunteer, then a match might not be possible for everybody, but we hope it doesn’t come to that.

We don’t use an algorithm, we simply do our best to scan through the list of available mentors and mentee requests to see how we can best meet the needs of mentees. If you provide more information about in open-ended question (the last one on the form), that can be helpful. We often know many of the mentors (as ES is a small world), and this can inform our pairing choices.

Yes, please do. We don’t expect a mentor to volunteer for multi-year commitments, and if you would like a mentor more than one year in a row, please fill out a new form.

In STEM disciplines in the US, being a PhD student is a paying job. Isn’t that cool? The pay isn’t great, but it is typically enough for one person to live frugally. You don’t need a fellowship to be in grad school, because if a program accepts you, they should identify funding for you, often by teaching (as a TA), or as a research assistant (RA), or some other way. Having a fellowship is nice because of the prestige as a career boost, as well as more freedom to choose where you attend grad school, and you also won’t have to TA or RA as much leaving more time for your own research.