Speaker
Description
Young researchers often are highly dependent on research software for their work. While some software skills are a basic
necessity in many, if not most, scientific fields today, the skill set so acquired is usually not sufficient to effectively develop, maintain, and design the larger software projects upon which much of modern scientific collaborative work is built.
This deficit not only influences their own scientific output negatively but also leaves a gap in their ability to teach future students and limits their scientific flexibility and opportunities for collaboration.
To help address these issues, the SSC Fellowship Programme was established at the Scientific Software Centre (SSC) at the University of Heidelberg in Summer 2024. It complements the SSC's activities of providing software development services, consultations and courses with a dedicated support programme for young researchers at the PhD or Postdoc level at Heidelberg University.
Following a competitive selection process, SSC fellows are allocated a mentor from the SSC research software engineers, and are provided with regular one-to-one support for the research software aspects of their project, encompassing the full spectrum of research software engineering, from support on coding to algorithm selection, licensing and software architecture.
In addition to the benefits for the mentees, the fellowship programme provides mentors with the opportunity to gain more in-depth knowledge about software demands and development practices in a particular scientific field, as well as to expand their professional horizons and learn about new tools, techniques, packages or teaching.
In the proposed talk, I will give an overview of the concept, goals, and scope of the SSC fellowship programme. Secondly, I will discuss our experiences so far, the challenges this programme presents for us as well as potential improvements. The presentation will be multifaceted, presenting the benefits and challenges for mentees, mentors, and our group as a whole. By sharing our experiences with the SSC fellowship programme, we hope to inspire further discussion on RSE outreach and education projects and how to improve and maintain them.
| I want to participate in the youngRSE prize | yes |
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