Education & Career Services ContactsAGU Joins MentorNet to Support Young Geoscientiststs
AGU has joined MentorNet as a partner in a mentoring network that encourages diversity in the engineering and science professions. MentorNet matches protégés and mentors and provides mentoring advice, suggestions, and gentle reminders to keep the exchange going. This partnership makes it possible for AGU to connect student members who would like a mentor in the geosciences with members who want to mentor.
Mentoring is key to encouraging young people—particularly women, Latinos, and African Americans—to become involved and stay involved with the sciences. MentorNet partners with institutions of higher education, industry, government, and professional societies to provide online programs to serve science professionals and students.
An award-winning nonprofit organization founded in 1998, MentorNet provides an easy way for AGU members to share their expertise and wisdom with students. AGU Fellow and MentorNet Board Member Mary Lou Zoback was key to convincing AGU to join MentorNet. She is a principle investigator on a recent 2-year, $150,000 U.S. National Science Foundation grant to target the geosciences with e-mentoring services.
More than 10,000 mentors have been matched through MentorNet's One-on-One E-Mentoring program. Although MentorNet was designed for the U.S. science and engineering community, it is not limited to the United States and is available to all AGU members.
To meet the challenge of using Earth's resources wisely and preserving the environment while improving the life of the poor, the need for the best minds in the geosciences is crucial, and young people from around the world need to become Earth and space scientists. Providing sustained mentoring is among the most effective ways to attract students to the Earth and space sciences and keep them in the profession, and MentorNet is a simple way to provide this sustained mentoring.
To sign up for MentorNet, go to http://www.mentornet.net/protege and follow the instructions for joining. For more information, contact Alexandra Velasquez at alexv@mentornet.net.
—Ines Cifuentes, Manager, AGU Education and Career Services; E-mail: icifuentes@ agu.org
This article first appeared in the 17 November 2009 issue of Eos