Stemettes Celebrates Eight-year Anniversary with Deutsche Bank

This International Women’s Day we are celebrating our eight-year anniversary with Deutsche Bank.

Almost since the inception of Stemettes, Deutsche Bank has provided support and belief in our mission as part of its youth engagement programme Born to Be which aims to raise aspirations of state secondary school students by helping them to develop the skills needed for 21st-century employment.

They have been the founding partner of our flagship mentoring programme, Student to Stemette. Our mentoring programme matches non-binary and young women students with STEM-professional role models who identify as women and non-binary. They provide a minimum of eight hours of one-to-one personalised support across a four-month period, that’s one hour every fortnight. Our mentoring team host regular fun, engaging virtual events every fortnight to ensure the wellbeing of our young mentees was kept at the core of the programme throughout.?

Student to Stemette is more than just a mentoring programme. It successfully provides the bridge needed from education to the STEM industry, and every journey across that bridge has been unique. We are connecting the next generation to a wide STEM network of professionals, they meet fellow peers along the way and over 90% of our matches since 2014 are still connected today.?

Through our partnership with Deutsche Bank, we’ve supported 449 mentees on our programme over eight years. They provide over half of the role models, an incredible 237 mentors, who have taken time and energy to support girls and non-binary students looking for support in exploring routes into STEM careers. This means that they have offered a minimum of?2192 hours of personalised support?to help us engage, inform and connect?young minds and show them that these STEM sectors need them more than ever before, all this at no financial cost to the mentees.

“My mentor and I successfully discussed university and courses to select something that’s suitable for me, also my mentor helped me prepare for interviews which turned out to be very useful.”?- Former Student to Stemette (STS) mentee, Tharuka.

We’ve calculated that Deutsche Bank employees have volunteered 4932 hours of their time to deliver mentoring and employability skills workshops to our Stemettes. This is women-led mentorship with a large support network of male volunteers helping the employability workshops and work experience placements. As a direct result of their financial assistance, we were able to send 25 Stemettes overseas for all expenses paid life-changing trips to the United States, including the opportunity to attend the Grace Hopper Conference. The world's largest women in computing event.?

“It really helps to have someone support you through any decisions you may have to make and to help boost your confidence where needed. It is nice to have another person's perspective on things and to have someone who knows the steps required for you to get to the places you would like to be.” - Former STS?mentee, Dorothea.

The aim of our flagship programme Student to Stemette is to increase the confidence of young people, encourage them to?consider a career in STEM, support them with applying for work experience, give them opportunities to practise their presentation and interview skills, assist with university, apprenticeships and job applications and of course, enhance their STEM network.

“I would definitely recommend that programme to other young people. This programme has helped improve in so many ways, my confidence, my knowledge of STEM, my mindset, my connections and so much more has skyrocketed thanks to this programme. It builds you from the bottom up making you taller and stronger, ensuring that you don't topple over along the way. There is always someone to talk to for support whether that be your mentor, your peers or the Stemettes Team. Everyone radiates positivity and ambition, there is no other programme like this one.” - Former STS?mentee, Anuphiya.

With the use of Deutsche Bank’s partnership, we’ve been able to develop our flagship programme to include; internal Deutsche Bank global hackathon spaces for Stemette students, provide STEM work experiences, CV workshops, STEM career networking events, mock interview events, wellness events, Open Circles, an afternoon with Tim Peake, an audience with Michelle Obama, free tickets to Women of Silicon Roundabout, tickets to Shakespeare Globe Theatre and these are just to name but a few.?

We completely transformed our face-to-face women-led mentorship programme to provide much-needed support to our beneficiaries in 2020 when the pandemic hit. With the continued support of Deutsche Bank we moved the programme to become fully virtual. This had great benefits in expanding our geographical reach, many more role models stepped up to become Stemette mentors and we were able to support students all over the UK.?

We are now excited to start the next chapter. Hybrid mentorship, combining the virtual with the in-person and gets the best of both worlds.

As our eight-year partnership draws to a close, we would like to thank Deutsche Bank for helping to change the lives of so many of our Stemettes and show them that there is a space in STEM for them.?

Interested in getting involved?

Email: [email protected]?

Learn more about our flagship mentoring programme Student to Stemette: stemettes.org/sts

#GirlsInSTEM #STEMeducation? #STEMCareers #mentoringmatters #leadership?