- Doaa
Yevgeniya Tyumina (CC-BY)
Mentee! Yes, this is how it started 2 years ago as a mentee in OLS 7. It was the first time I felt this wasn’t just another course about leadership or developing a project (I ended up building Open Science Community Egypt!), but a real community where you do have people watching your back.
What makes OLS a good community is that everyone is very nice and helpful, plus they teach you open principles – values like collaboration, transparency, and community contribution. After finishing the program–which has a unique mentoring component that’s a really good advantage–they may ask if you want to become a facilitator, mentor or expert. I did experience the facilitator role, and it was a nice way to get involved with the community.
Later, about seven months ago, they interviewed me to be a Resident Fellow for marketing and outreach. From this point, I worked more closely with the community. Being part of the core team showed me a different side and a deeper side of OLS!
At the very beginning, I had an onboarding person in addition to my line manager. So, if I was struggling with anything, I had people watching my back–I really liked this point.
Another advantage of this fellowship is that I collaborated with different and diverse people, plus used many platforms, which made me gain new experience for personal and technical skills.
As a Resident Fellow for marketing, especially for the Nebula program, I started with a survey to identify the gaps and opportunities to work on. Then, I wrote the marketing plan and applied it to the program marketing campaign.
The impact and the engagement we had were great, and the feedback and testimonials (Testimonials) we received were stunning and motivated. I also had the chance to experience some of the cohort management tasks like leading a graduation call, facilitating some cohort calls, even leading a workshop to market Nebula’s new cohort.
Also, being part of a team that lives in different time zones encouraged me to be more flexible and open to collaborating with each other. At the end of my fellowship, there are some things I really appreciate and am glad to have, which are the good friends I gained, the team meetings I enjoyed, and the 1:1 meetings with my manager, Irene Ramos and the lovely Debs (my onboarding person) who is always checking in on me.