ScholarX 2020 Experience: December
This has been a very delayed entry. And this will be my final entry regarding ScholarX 2020. I will use this entry to summarize the overall experience and my thoughts on my ScholarX experience.
I first heard about SEF in October 2018, and about their ScholarX program by one of my friends Tarindu who was in that program in the year 2019. Hearing about this program from him, I was interested in what it could offer. I visited their website and expressed interest through their listed email. One year later, I had gone through a very successful internship and had finished a university semester following that when I received information that I have been shortlisted into the ScholarX 2020 program.
I was happy to hear this news. Checking out the mentors for 2020 also made me excited to be a part in the program. After several weeks of me letting the ScholarX team know about my preferred mentors, I received news of who my assigned mentor was. Dr. Nadeesha Chandrasena is a very accomplished individual with a lot of research experience under her belt. While I was happy about this, she was a person outside of my field which gave birth to some initial concerns. However, I decided to pursue the program anyway since I believed that I am still able to gain a lot from an accomplished mentor the likes of her.
Meanwhile the entire country was on lockdown from the highly infectious COVID-19 pandemic that has made its way to us. It took a couple of weeks for us to get acclimated to this new way of living. Therefore it is not surprising that it took that time for us (Dr. Nadeesha’s mentor group) to have our first meeting with our mentor. Our interactions with our mentor proved fruitful as she explain how important it is to have a solid short-term plan which fits well into a more abstract long term plan we have in mind regarding our academics and professional career. She helped her assigned mentees when it came to polishing their CVs before internships as well as prospective higher studies candidates with their applications. Following her advice on planning for the future, my current plan for my future has actually deviated from what I had in mind prior to the ScholarX 2020 program.
A lot happened between this entry and the last entry. As a final year undergraduate from the University of Moratuwa, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, I am part of a small group that’s working on our Final Year Project (FYP). We have been putting a considerable amount of effort into this and we felt recognized when a paper we wrote regarding one aspect of our FYP got accepted into the Big Graphs workshop of the international IEEE Big Data conference. But even after this notice we had to put a good amount of effort in to give the final submissions (Final formatted paper, video presentation etc.) to this conference. Moreover, our department held its career fair for the final year undergraduates. I was a part of the organizing committee, specifically in charge of selecting the platform and creating the protocols that adhere to department’s career fair process. Keeping in mind the advice Dr. Nadeesha gave, I did not apply to many companies and only applied to ones that fit into my plans for the future, of which I decided to pursue a path of a research engineer.
This sums up my ScholarX 2020 experience as well as the context surrounding it. For prospective scholars who want to be part of this program / are a part of this program my message is that you might not get exactly what you initially asked for. I did not receive the mentor initially put forth in my preferences. However it did not mean that I gained nothing valuable from the program. If you have determination to follow through with any opportunity to get something valuable then the ScholarX program will be helpful for you
