Each Team is assigned an APUC Mentor for the duration of the competition. An APUC mentor has expertise in scientific and engineering innovation challenges. They will be either the challenge proposer (University of Bristol academic or Aegis Professor), or relevant colleague from the university or the Aegis Professor’s place of work.
It is expected that Teams will meet with their mentors twice. An additional mentoring session will be provided online focussing on producing effective posters and oral presentations. This session will be recorded and uploaded to the website. APUC Mentoring guidance is outlined below.
Mentoring guidelines
The primary role of the APUC mentor is to:
- Provide examples from their own experiences on developing solutions for real world scientific problems.
- Act as a sounding board* for the team.
- Provide encouragement.
- Provide a few sentences on team working (e.g. who did what, challenges they faced etc), which will contribute towards the Effective Team Working assessment criteria, which makes up 20% of the overall score (note that Effective Team Working will also be assessed during the final presentation).
The mentor should:
- Provide an open and supportive relationship for their team.
- Serve as a role model.
- keep the Team ideas confidential.
- Abide by the APUC Code of Conduct.
The mentor should not:
- Be obliged to give more time than is allocated. This is stated as a maximum of two one-hour sessions. Any additional support is at the discretion of the mentors.
- Provide the ideas and solutions to the team challenge.
- Design or write material for the presentation outputs.
- Provide pastoral support. The university has procedures to follow around Wellbeing. If any issues do arise, please let the APUC Organising Committee know immediately (scif-apuc@bristol.ac.uk ).
- Deal with incidents or bullying allegations. The university has a process that can be found here. Any incidents should be reported to the SPO immediately.
*person that you use to test something such as a new idea or suggestion to see if they will accept it or if they think it will work
If you don’t hear from your APUC mentor after making contact
If you do not hear from your APUC mentor (within 2 weeks of contacting them) please contact the APUC organising committee at scif-apuc@bristol.ac.uk .
