Research In Peace- Mentorship Program

[anupamm98]

Overview

We've often seen the disparity between Tier-1 and Tier-3 engineering colleges in India in terms of placements. Often this disparity ends up demotivating tier-3 engineering students and instills a sense of apathy. While it is also true that sometimes it spurs the competition and we've seen those linkedIn posts - "Not from Tier-1". While scaler academy has been bridging this gap in terms of placements, there is yet another domain where this gap is huge- Research.

Research in computer science is almost impossible without the right mentors. To put this in perspective, let's look at the comparison between Tier-1 and Tier-3 Engineering colleges in terms of "factors responsible for a smooth research journey".

Tier-1 vs Tier-3 Colleges:

1. Availability of seniors who have done some research. Culture of amazing junior-senior interaction.
2. Better professors
3. Availability of hardware and software resources. (Typically used in ML and AI research)

"Research In Peace" is a platform to connect students seeking guidance and the mentors (College seniors or working professionals). It solves two of the above problems (1 and 2) by connecting students with mentors who have previous experience in research. While it solves the problems for students, there needs to be a good incentive for mentors, which can be:

1. A certificate that certifies that the given person has mentored a student.
2. Scaler coins which can be redeemed for Scaler programs.

User stories

--Researchers--

1. I should be able to see the scope of this mentorship program, there should be a well defined curriculum.
2. I should be assigned a mentor with previous experience in my field of interest.
3. I should have access to a grievance platform in case the mentorship program doesn't go as expected.
4. I should have a feature for "Chat/Call with my mentor".
5. I should be able to provide feedback for my mentor post the mentorship program.
6. There should be well defined online sessions when I can chat/call with my mentor based on our schedules.

--Mentors--

1. I should be assigned to a researcher with the field of interest that I have experience in.
2. I should have a feature for "Chat/Call with my mentee".
3. I should have access to a grievance platform in case the mentorship program doesn't go as expected.
4. My personal contact details should not be shared with the mentee. We should only connect via the scaler platform.
5. There should be well defined online sessions when I can chat/call with my mentee based on our schedules.

Features

--Common Features--

1. SignUp/SignIn
2. Enroll in the research mentorship program
3. Filter researchers/mentors with respect to the popular fields (Computer Vision, NLP, AR, VR etc.)
4. Chat/Call feature.
5. Grievance Platform.
6. Notification (via text, mail) feature to notify researcher/mentor if one person is present in the online session and the other person is not.

--For researchers--

1. Feedback feature.
2. Upvote/Downvote (Post mentorship program).
3. Sort mentors based on upvotes.

--For mentors--

1. Send certificate via mail.
2. Credit scaler coins.
3. Ban mentors with too many downvotes (Can come up with a precise percentage).

Benefits for Scaler

1. More traction on Scaler.com
2. Since most of the research is done in the field of ML and AI. This will result in more enrolments in Data Science program.