UFAW Mentoring Partnership
UFAW is committed to supporting the development of animal welfare science worldwide. We are especially keen to ensure that animal welfare science develops in areas where it has yet to become firmly established. One way in which UFAW achieves this is through supporting the next generation of animal welfare scientists.
Not all students have access to the help and resources needed to plan a scientific research proposal. Guidance in project-planning and experimental design is important. Offering this to students early in their careers will help them ask the right scientific questions and use the appropriate methodology to answer them. This will ensure that meaningful and scientifically valid conclusions can be made from their work.
In an effort to address this issue, UFAW is running a Mentoring Partnership scheme in which Mentors are paired with Students wishing to be mentored.
Mentors will predominantly be early career researchers (ECRs) with a strong background in animal welfare science who have the capacity, time, and willingness to support the Student.
Students will mainly be at undergraduate or master’s level interested in carrying out animal welfare research (although they do not have to be animal welfare students). Please note that PhD students are not currently eligible to apply – the scheme is still relatively small and consequently limited to BSc/MSc level students. Additionally, this scheme is currently only available to students wishing to receive mentoring guidance on how best to undertake an animal welfare research project – not for general mentoring (with no project plans).
The Student mentee will be paired with a more experienced Mentor who can then guide and support the Student in the early stages of project planning to ensure that their project (whether experimental, survey, or other) has a solid scientific foundation.
UFAW anticipates that the pairing will prove beneficial to both parties:
Mentor:
- Opportunity to gain experience of supervision, a skill they are likely to find highly useful later in their career
- Obtain credit as UFAW Mentor for their CV
- Learn about the culture in another country or a different research area/department
- Forge international connections
- Gain experience of an area of research that may differ slightly from their own work
Student:
- Improve their knowledge on experimental design
- Forge international connection with an ECR from another faculty/country
- Improve likelihood of publication
- May encourage students to become supervisors and mentors themselves, thus further expanding animal welfare science capacity
We invite those who think they may benefit from the scheme, as either a Mentor or Student, to please apply:
Mentoring applications are considered periodically throughout the year after the following deadlines: 15 February; 15 May; and 15 September.
Your application will be reviewed following the closest deadline after your submission. We then aim to inform all applicants about the outcome of their submission within 4 to 6 weeks of this deadline date.
