How to Navigate Academia and Industry in a Virtual World:
Mentoring for Young Professionals
Organized by SSCS & EDS Women in Circuits and Young Professionals
This event will be held in conjunction with VLSI Symposia 2021.
You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend this event.

Please use the RSVP link to let us know if you'll be attending. A link and instructions on how to join the event will be emailed to you a few days before the event.

This event will be held in two sessions, to ensure people all around the world can attend:
  • SESSION ONE- June 13 09:00 JST / June 12 17:00 PDT / June 13 02:00 CEST
  • SESSION TWO - June 18 00:00 JST / June 17 08:00 PDT / June 17 17:00 CEST

Are you having a hard time finding a job in the new virtual world? Is remote work proving to be challenging to maintain the work-life balance? Have you always wanted to know whether an academic job is right for you? 

We are pleased to organize an exciting mentoring session at VLSI Symposium 2021 to help answer these and many more questions you may have, as you navigate your academic or industry career and job search and maintain the balance in your life. We will have two slots to provide as much mentoring as possible – one at the beginning of the conference and one at the end. 

As VLSI Symposium goes online in 2021, we are transforming our flagship event into an online event. The mentoring sessions will have breakout rooms/round tables with selected topics. Each breakout room/round tables will have 2-3 mentors with different backgrounds (technical and geographical). The session is intended to go as a casual Q&A.

Possible mentoring topics (subject to change):
  • Mentoring and Networking in the Virtual World
  • The New Work / Life Balance
  • The How-to for Virtual Job Search
  • On the Way to Tenure
  • Becoming a Professor
  • How to Become a Leader
  • Career/Self Development
  • Communication Skills / Negotiation
  • A career in Industry / Starts up

We encourage all mentors and mentees to briefly introduce themselves at the beginning of the breakout session. As a mentee, you can join whichever room you choose and chat with the mentors assigned to that room or just listen. It will also be possible to switch between rooms if you wish to attend to different topics during the event. 

The mentoring event is structured as follows:
- SSCS/EDS WiC and YP introductions (10 minutes)
- Parallel mentoring sessions (50 minutes)

Organizers: 
Ulkuhan Guler - Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Zeynep Lulec - ADI
Farhana Sheikh - Intel
Kathy Wilcox - AMD
Alice Wang - Everactive
Zeynep Deniz Toprak -IBM TJ Watson
Carolina Mora Lopez - imec
Tinoosh Mohsenin - University of Maryland
Samira Zali Asl - Ferric
Xiyuan Tang - University of Texas  at Austin
Yasemin Engur - EPFL
Preet Garcha - TI
Awani Khodkumbhe - TI
Avantika Singh - University of California LA
Maneesha Yellepeddi - Intel
Camilo Velez Cuervo, University of California, Irvine