I recently joined Women in HPC, an organisation that promotes mentoring and networking for professionals in high performance computing. I discovered the initiative while reviewing a Python conference schedule and was drawn to their structured four-month mentoring programme. As part of this, I meet regularly on Slack and on call with both my mentor and mentee to exchange technical knowledge and career experiences. The programme has been an excellent opportunity to engage with the broader HPC community and stay connected to current best practices.

In my mentoring role, I’m supporting a postdoctoral researcher in Germany as she learns to run parallel jobs efficiently using Slurm. It’s been rewarding to help troubleshoot and guide someone through the complexities of HPC workflow and big data wrangling. On the other side, I’m fortunate to be mentored by a computational scientist of a major European HPC centre. That’s an experience I’m particularly looking forward to as I continue developing my understanding of large-scale computing infrastructure and leadership in this space. It’s a fantastic reminder of how much growth can come from both sides of a mentoring relationship.