20 Years Anniversary TANDEM on May 11, 2023
20 years of TANDEM mentoring programs at RWTH! We were happy to take this as an opportunity to celebrate together with more than one hundred current and former mentees, and mentors*, members of the rectorate, companions* and guests from the university.
20 years of TANDEM mentoring programs at RWTH! We were happy to take this as an opportunity to celebrate together with more than one hundred current and former mentees, and mentors*, members of the rectorate, companions* and guests from the university.
The event, moderated by Professor Torsten H. Voigt, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, marked the official start of the TANDEM anniversary year 2023. It began with an introductory film about the TANDEM mentoring programs and music by a string trio, followed by greetings from members of the university’s rectorate.
In his video message, Professor Ulrich Rüdiger, Rector of RWTH, highlighted the pioneering work done at the university - in 2002, RWTH was one of the first universities nationwide to initiate a mentoring program. As he said, he was proud and pleased that RWTH as a technical university with core engineering disciplines had recognized the importance of gender equality already 20 years ago and had established mentoring as a tool for gender-equitable human resources development. Professor Rüdiger said he sees institutional mentoring as an important signal of the university's commitment to equal opportunity.
Professor Sabine Brück, the Vice Rector for Human Resources and Young Academics, then reported how much it meant to her to award participants of completed program rounds their certificates and to see the sustainable networking structures of the participants. According to her, networks are an essential module on the road to success.
20 years of TANDEM – Celebrating a successfull story, this is how Gitta Doebert and Kati Korst, the program managers, titled their overview presentation of the mentoring program‘s development. They were very pleased to announce the start of a brand new program, TANDEMbridge, which aims at participants in the status passage to a doctorate.
In her key note, Professor Ada Pellert, Rector of FernUni Hagen, spoke about the importance of Mentoring as a contribution to human resources and organizational development at universities. Afterwards, she was ready to answer questions from the audience, together with Karin Loh and her mentor Professor Sabine Schlittmeier, participants of TANDEMdok 2019, as well as Vize Rector Sabine Brück and Gitta Doebert.
Furthermore, two tandems, each consisting of a mentee and her mentor, shared their personal experiences of their relationship via video and live link, thus making the effects tangible that mentoring can have.
Before numerous guests took advantage of the opportunity for mutual exchange, the official festive event ended as it began, with a film: members of the committees for selecting new mentees commented on their lessons learned and congratulated the TANDEM mentoring programs on their anniversary.