Project Goals

I. Tandem-Oriented Goals

The individual long-term support through the co-mentors can help the students to:

  • Focus on their personal and academic strengths and expand their potential in a targeted fashion
  • Experience themselves in an active and creative role
  • Cope with career and personal obstacles self-confidently
  • Increase their autonomy and emancipation

II. Life Planning

The individual long-term support through the co-mentors can help the students to:

  • Develop their own perspective and expectations
  • Handle the limitations and breaks they encounter during their life
  • Appreciate and utilization of diversity
  • Receive orientation support
  • Become acquainted with different role models
  • Boost their self-assertiveness and improve their self-organization skills
  • Become competent in conflict resolution
  • Develop their own views of what constitutes personal success
  • Find solutions to problems and challenges that express their own wishes and needs

III. Study and Professional Planning

The individual long-term support through the co-mentor can help the students (to):

  • Identify and plan the (future) focus of their academic studies
  • Implement realistic time management and planning
  • Identify the professional career they want to pursue and become acquainted with other professional environments (i.e. via internships etc, where possible)
  • Establish networks both with their peers, the group of co-mentors and other project participants

IV. Socio-Political Goals

In the mid-term, the project will hopefully generate impulses on the socio-political level such as:

  • Improved conditions for female academics both in the academia and the job markets
  • Testing of a new, exemplary programme model for inclusive career support for women;
  • Development of a set of recommended actions for the tertiary education sector in respect to gender-specific inclusion
  • Practical implementation of the right to access to education stipulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Why Co-Mentors also profit

Mentoring is designed to be a mutually beneficial relationship

 ...both personally and professionally. That means: it shouldn't be rewarding for the mentee as well as the co-mentor. Here's an overview of the opportunities being a mentor may provide:

  • A critical examination of their own life/career and their present professional circumstances
  • An active function in the promotion of highly motivated young academics
  • Insights into the individual situation and career-oriented decission-making processes of junior scientists
  • Feedback in respect to their own counselling style and development/refinement of counselling skills
  • Enhanced leadership and social competencies
  • Interdisciplinary, inter-generational and inter-university networking
  • The satisfying chance to pass on one's own experiences outside the family or job context

The program "CompetenceTandems", will also become a platform dedicated to the discussion and development of recommendations for gender-specific inclusion in the educational sector, science and research. If you are interested in these issue, becoming a mentor may be worthwhile only for this reason.