JMA’s Mentorship Program began as a partnership with the Zimbabwe Science Fair’s Purpose Lab (in Zimbabwe) with the Brown University Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME) student body to provide guidance for learning more about STEM topics, help with standardized testing, help with applications to American Universities/navigating the process, and/or general mentorship for any academic, personal, emotional support.
Our program then expanded to mentee students hailing from Ghana, Botswana, and London, and mentor students hailing from universities across the country including: University of Georgia and UC Santa Barbara!
To date, 36 students from Zimbabwe were matched with an individual, one-on-one mentor, best suited for their academic/personal needs! The goal is to create a longitudinal relationship between mentors and mentees, where mentors can give helpful guidance unavailable to most students from Zimbabwe, and mentees can provide a unique relationship for mentors, broadening their outlook to people, cultures, and communities from across the globe!
The Purpose Lab is a cohort of Zimbabwean students (from as young as 13 to as old as 22) from diverse, resource scarce backgrounds from the country. JMA has worked with the Purpose Lab to equip these students with cutting edge STEM knowledge (spanning topics like synthetic biology, biotechnology, CRISPR, and more) to give them foundational knowledge required to pursue higher-level work in STEM research, community impact bio-startups, college education and more.
All these students are incredibly bright and have the capacity to do amazing things in STEM fields, but just lack the guidance, resources, and information to do so — which is where our mentors come in!
Mentees from Zimbabwe filled out a google form detailing their contact info, what topics they would like help with (learning more about STEM topics, help with standardized testing, help with applications to American Universities/navigating the process, and/or general mentorship for any academic, personal, emotional support), other areas of interest (dancing, aeronautical engineering, literature, etc), and a brief introduction.
Based on all these details, each student was matched with an individual mentor from Brown University with similar interests, and expertise in the fields they requested.
Mentors and mentees were provided with some educational material on biotechnology from our collaboration with Professor Achilli from Brown’s “Biotechnology in Medicine” class as starting point material, provided access to a current Brown University student from Zimbabwe to approach for any questions on the Zimbabwean education system/international student application process, scholarship resources for Zimbabwean students, and free-of-cost standardized test prep books/practice tests.
Every single one of our mentees are profoundly genuine in their love of science, and have worked incredibly hard to learn more about STEM despite a lack of resources and educational material presented to them.
Thank you to all our mentors for their time and commitment to this process. I am so, incredibly excited to see how much all the bright students of the Purpose Lab are able to learn from our amazing PLME community — and, in turn, how much our PLME community is able to learn from them!
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