Following on from the GDST LEAD event last week, our Year 12 enterprise team proudly launched their award-winning mentorship programme ‘Learn With Me’ at school on Monday evening. Driven by a passion to create a mentoring scheme that links pupils in our school to female leaders in STEAM-based fields, the Sixth Formers welcomed an audience of Year 10 eager to benefit from the experience, as they heard from their potential mentors.
Each mentor gave a brief career history, before having the opportunity to engage with their prospective mentees personally. Mentors included: acclaimed neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at UCL, Sophie Scott CBE; Vice Principal of Lewisham College, Jayne Morgan; Statistics Advisor for the Department for International Development, Sehr Syed; Business Psychologist and LSE Teaching Fellow, Anna Czaplewska-Jaffery; Sustainability Engineer, Ishita Pandey and Software Developer, Samar Naqvi.
With such an extensive list of industry professionals, our pupils were spoilt for choice when it came to choosing whom they would like to be mentored by. In their introductory speeches, the mentors gave insights into their respective journeys and highlighted the reasons that this mentor scheme is very much needed to guide the generation through their industries. For example, Sophie Scott CBE mentioned the misogyny that still exists in her industry, recounting times where she’s been the only woman in a room full of men and been the person asked to make the coffee. Another example was where she was a keynote speaker at an event and the technician didn’t believe it when she turned up to rehearsals.
These are the kind of prejudices and challenges currently being faced by women across many industries, but our entrepreneurs very much hope that the next generation of STEAM women won’t have to. It is clear why the team won an award for the idea most closely linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Moving forward, each mentee will now have three online sessions with their mentors to gain advice and insight into their journeys to help with their own career choices as they start to look towards their futures. A successful launch to what could be an influential building block in the lives of our young pupils.
Speaking about the programme, the group said:
GDST LEAD taught us how to work effectively as a team, be resourceful and resilient in the face of setbacks, the value of planning ahead and how to delegate tasks for maximum efficiency. Although we all knew each other before, doing this gave us the opportunity to work with members of Year 12 that we otherwise wouldn’t have. It feels incredible to leave a legacy behind us.
