Mentor Café

9 November 2021, by Iuliia Polkova

Photo: Yichi Zhang

The Mentor Café is a nice tradition yearly organized by the faculty students representatives (FSR) of the geophysics and oceanography departments at the University of Hamburg for those who just started the Bachelor of Science. The idea behind this event is to welcome new-coming students to the faculty and provide a platform for getting to know students from various semesters, lecturers, and research staff. Last year, due to the pandemic, the event was organized online, which is not quite the same as this year’s in-presence event. We all could meet live in the seminar room of the ZMAW building (Bundesstrasse 53), complying with the Covid regulations.

This was the first time for me to attend the Mentor Café. I must admit I should have done this in previous years too. I assumed that new bachelor students are probably more interested in meeting lecturers and more senior students to get an idea about what they should expect in the next four years of their study. As a researcher, I felt that I cannot provide them with that kind of insight. In many national and international research projects, teaching or supervising students is not part of a researcher’s duties. Thus, even working at a university that is full of students, many scientists with purely research contracts might never come into contact with students. Which was always a little bit odd to me, and I tried to engage in teaching and mentoring as part of my initiative. Thus, this year I decided to check out the Mentor Café. And I am glad that I did. As the name suggests, the event had a café-like atmosphere, where we split into small groups and chatted at the table with students of various semesters and senior staff members. Students told me that some of them were 18 years old, an obvious fact which I seemed to forget. It warmed my heart and brought me memories about my own Bachelor's study, my worries, and expectations... My insights into a researcher's career were most welcomed. The new students were very curious about the life of a researcher, skills, and background needed to become a researcher, daily routine, exciting expeditions. I think they might have been a little bit disappointed when I told them that I am a modeler and most of the time I spend the day staring at the monitor. Well, it is true, not every researcher goes on mind-boggling expeditions and makes field experiments in a remote place on Earth, which I also felt like a drawback in my modeling career for quite a long time. But now I don’t feel that way. I love programming. And just imagine I have a privilege to run Earth System Model experiments, to learn how the climate was in the past and how it will be in the future. I search for explanations about why nature and model climate behave the way they do, and have interesting discussions about findings with my peers. I hope I might have convinced some of the students that modeling careers can be exciting too; we will see later.

This year’s credit for organizing the event goes to the present student council. Well done! A regular Mentor Café would be a great continuation of this event.