Did you know that the CSEG Foundation Mentorship Program is entering its 11th year? It’s amazing to think how much this program has grown since its inception in 2008 when a small group of dedicated volunteers decided that student Geophysicists needed a (free) program that would enable them to build a foothold in the industry. The program’s heart was always about cultivating relationships as a foundation to build stronger geoscientists for tomorrow; one-on-one pairings of industry professionals with student geophysicists, with those pairings setting goals, sharing challenges, insights, and learnings over the course of the university school year through informal and formal meetups, coffees, email and phone calls.
Fast forward 11 years and the program has grown not only in size but in scope. We’ve expanded our focus beyond just students to include emerging professionals through our sister program EPP. We have partnerships with the CSPG GeoWomen and U of C Geo Alumni groups as well as with Danielle Wolf, career advisor with the Haskayne School of Business. The program supports geophysicists, geologists, and engineers from across Canada.
One of the most exciting recent developments for our program is the initiation of our Mentor Resource List. In our discipline, we have an incredible community of leaders, teachers, and mentors but not everybody has the time to be a full-time Mentor. That is why we created the Mentor Resource List. Industry experts have identified their areas of expertise and made themselves available to our program members as resources. If a pairing has a particular area of interest outside of the expertise of that pairings mentor, they can access the Mentor Resource List through the committee and contact one of our resources about that topic.
Whether you are a mentee curious about a certain topic that your mentor may not be an expert in or a mentor that would like to introduce a new subject to your mentee, we hope that our volunteers in the Mentorship Resource List will be able to enhance the quality of that discussion.
A great event to start the year with is the Mentorship program sponsored Junior Geophysicist Forum. Continuing with their mission of engaging young geoscientists in a way that is a dynamic and inspiring, the participants in this years event will be split into groups and attempt to design and market a product, service or process to address a major risk facing Canadian exploration and production companies, with the help of subject matter experts in Engineering, Business, Geoscience and Data Science. We will also be announcing our second annual Mentor and Mentee of the 2018/2019 year at the beginning of the event. Hope to see you there on October 23rd, 2019, 4pm-8pm.
This year we will also be doing something a little different - we plan to run a focused Mentorship Kick-off/Meetup. The purpose of this event is to help our pairings to game-plan and strategize for the year - how to set goals, how to make the most of the year, etc. We want our pairings to be able to hit the ground running - The Mentorship year goes by quickly and we want both Mentors and Mentees to get the absolute most out of it. The event is planned for the second week of October after initials pairings are made.
We will continue to run both student and mentor workshops throughout the year, with a focus on teaching students how to maximize their visibility and build skill sets necessary to be successful in this industry. We also want to continue to support our Mentors as they truly are the current and future leaders of our discipline and industry.
Though times continue to be tough, the CSEG Foundation and the Mentorship program looks forward to the opportunity to support the next generation of great geoscientists. We have an incredible community within geophysics, and we want it to continue to grow and thrive. Mentorship is foundational to this growth and it’s why we are passionate about continuing to offer you this great program.
If you are interested in joining our program in 2019/2020 as a student mentee or as a mentor, please find more information at our website https://cseg.ca/students/geophysics-mentorship-program or email us at mentorship@cseg.ca.
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