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Home/Magazine Archive/May 2023 (Vol. 66, No. 5)/Long-Term Mentoring for Computer Science Researchers/Abstract

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Long-Term Mentoring for Computer Science Researchers

By Emily Ruppel, Sihang Liu, Elba Garza, Sukyoung Ryu, Alexandra Silva, Talia Ringer
Communications of the ACM, May 2023, Vol. 66 No. 5, Pages 33-35
10.1145/3564287
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two women in discussion in front of computer displays — Credit: SeventyFour

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, we—leaders in the research areas of programming languages (PL) and computer architecture (CA)—realized we had a problem: the only way to form new lasting connections in the community was to already have lasting connections in the community. Our academic communities had wonderful short-term mentoring programs to address this problem, but it was clear we needed long-term mentoring programs.

Those of us in CA approached this scientifically, making an evidence-backed case for community-wide long-term mentoring.¹ In the meantime, one of us in PL had impulsively launched an unofficial long-term mentoring program, founded on chaos and spreadsheets. In January 2021, the latter grew to an official cross-institutional long-term mentoring program called SIGPLAN-M; in January 2022, the former grew to become known as Computer Architecture Long-term Mentoring (CALM).

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