The hugely successful initiative to support teenage girls to get into STEM is looking for new industry mentors.
The STEM Passport for Inclusion programme is looking for new mentors to inspire underrepresented teenage girls to get into STEM.
The award-winning programme was started by Prof Katriona O’Sullivan at Maynooth University five years ago to offer secondary school students from working-class backgrounds a pathway to study STEM at third level.
Through the programme, the students earn a Level 6 STEM qualification and get work experience opportunities and support from industry mentors.
After a successful start with 1,250 girls taking part in the first two years, STEM Passport for Inclusion was expanded nationwide in 2023 and Atlantic Technological University and Munster Technological University came on board to deliver the programme regionally. By the end of 2024, more than 5,300 girls had taken part.
Earlier this year, the initiative received nearly €900,000 from Research Ireland to further develop its programmes and engage another 5,000 students by 2027.
How to get involved
As it continues to grow, STEM Passport for Inclusion is now looking for more mentors to get involved.
Mentors are asked to dedicate 15 hours – including training time – between November and April to share their experiences with a small group of girls on the programme, to provide insights and advice, and most importantly to normalise the idea of women in STEM.
Eimear Michaels, a business operations director at Microsoft, has been a mentor on the programme since its inception. She feels she would have benefitted from something like the STEM Passport when she was a teenager. Michaels doesn’t have a STEM background and took what she describes as a roundabout route into a tech career.
“I went to a DEIS school and never thought I’d end up working in a company like Microsoft,” she tells SiliconRepublic.com.
“I had nobody talking to me about this kind of stuff when I was 15.”
For Michaels, what’s great about the programme is that it normalises tech careers for young girls and “opens their eyes to the possibilities of what they can do”.
It can be a bit daunting starting out as a mentor, she says, joking that presenting to a group of four or five teenage girls is scarier than presenting to your leadership team, but that within an hour, everyone is relaxed. “They realise I’m just a normal person. I have a story to tell. I have questions for them as much as they have questions for me.”
Gráinne McDonagh has been a mentor on the programme for more than four years. She says that it is a hugely energising and rewarding experience.
McDonagh got involved when she was working at Accenture, partly because of her own experience studying engineering at third level.
No one in her family had studied STEM so she felt she was stepping into the unknown, she says.
She remembers going to one of her first lectures at University College Dublin with maybe 300 students and realising that as a woman she was very much in the minority. Coming from an all-girls school and in a family with three sisters, this was a bit of a culture shock. She thinks she would have benefitted from a programme like the STEM Passport to feel more at ease in college, particularly in those early months.
Both McDonagh and Michaels say that mentors are supported throughout the programme. They both mention the reflection calls that mentors can join after each session to discuss how they got on and share tips. “It’s really nice to have that community of mentors,” McDonagh says.
Such is McDonagh’s love for mentoring others, she has since left Accenture and started her own coaching company to help people develop their careers. And she plans to keep mentoring for the STEM Passport as long as she can.
O’Sullivan, who details her own story of disadvantage to a PhD and beyond in her bestselling memoir Poor, emphasised the importance of mentoring as part of the programme she founded: “Mentorship is critical, providing students with role models who can guide and inspire them. Those who volunteer as mentors will not only impact the lives of individual students but will also contribute to building a stronger, more inclusive future workforce for Ireland.”
Anyone interested in becoming a mentor is encouraged to register their interest as soon as possible here. A short training session will take place online on 5 November.
The STEM Passport for Inclusion is funded by lead partner Microsoft Ireland, Research Ireland and the Department of Education, as well as by many industry and education partners.
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