Young Investigator Academy!!! 4th Call of Applications opens on 01.01.2025 and closes on 31.01.2025 !!!
Refer to Phase I. Enrollment for the application procedure
Aims of the program
Structure
Two pools of mentors have been created at the TCH Faculty based on their career stage to ensure productive interactions and steep learning curves of our mentees:
Pool A: experienced members of YIA (for example Senior Scientists or researchers on their tenure track) are perfectly suited to offer a relevant mentoring experience to younger researchers of the TCH (starting from their Postdoctoral stage).
Pool B: faculty members of TCH (Assoc. and Full Professors) are in a position to offer mentoring to the experienced members of YIA and discuss issues relevant to their next career stage. This mentorship type is also foreseen in the new Guideline concerning tenure track positions and qualification agreement (Laufbahnstellen Richtlinie ab 29.09.2023, point 3.7).
Both pools of mentors have been created on a voluntary basis, which means that only those relevant TCH members who are willing to contribute their time and effort and are ready to comply with our regulations (see below) have been be included in the list of potential mentors ready for matchmaking.
Procedure
To facilitate the matchmaking (which is organized by the members of YIA-TCH WG3 “Career and Independence”), we have created Questionnaires that both the mentees (faculty members willing to get a mentor from one of the pools) need to fill out during the application. The matchmaking is then based on the expectations/demands of the mentees as well as the expectations/experiences of the potential mentors.
We want to stress that the information that is to be exchanged during the mentoring meetings is to be treated as confidential. We expect both parties (mentors and mentees) to respect this rule and will enforce it by asking you to sign the confidentiality agreement before you are accepted to the program.
If you would like to take part in the YIA-TCH Career Mentoring program, the following steps are to be taken:
Phase I. Enrollment
Please think through the idea of such mentoring and how it could benefit you. Based on this, fill out the Questionnaire and provide as many details as possible. Email the filled-out form along with your current CV and any additional relevant info to careermentoring.yia_tch@list.tuwien.ac.at with the subject line “YIA-TCH Career Mentoring Application” to complete your application.
Three evaluation and matchmaking rounds will be organized every calendar year. The first call was open on 01.01.2024 (application deadline 31.01.2024). The second call was open on 01.05.2024 (application deadline 31.05.2024). The third call was open on 01.09.2024 (application deadline 30.09.2024). The 4th (current) call will be open on 01.01.2025 (application deadline 31.01.2025). The evaluation and pairing procedure are expected to take one month after the deadline. After we confirm the successful matching procedure, you will be officially enrolled in the program.
Phase II. Mentoring
During the mentoring phase, procedures and frequency of the meetings are to be decided by the involved mentor and mentee, however, we will provide some structure and thus guide the first steps of the mentorship.
As such, we recommend you organize your first meeting with the mentor as soon as possible and in this meeting discuss the overall need for the mentorship and your particular demands. Depending on your personal and professional situation, it could be good to start with a general introduction of your research and teaching profiles as well as to get informed about the experience that your mentor has.
At the end of this first meeting, we recommend you agree with your mentor about the frequency/duration of the meetings and at least outline the major topics to be discussed.
Based on prior experience of similar programs, we recommend having one meeting per month or two months over the period of 1 year. Each meeting shall be kept to ~1 hour and will be supported by coffee vouchers at TOP cinema bar (Rahlgasse 1, 1060 Wien).
Phase III. Feedback
We plan the YIA-TCH Career Mentoring to run over the years and to contribute strongly to support, advise, and guide Young Investigators of the Faculty throughout their career, we thus would be very interested in your detailed feedback on the program, its structure as well as the particularities of your mentor-mentee interactions which may be used to improve our approach and organization.
We ask you to fill out a Feedback form [will be supplied towards the end of each of the program calls] and send it to careermentoring.yia_tch@list.tuwien.ac.at with the subject line “YIA-TCH Career Mentoring Feedback” along with any of your informal feedback to complete the program.