Become a Tupu mentor
Help bring more diversity in tech, by mentoring someone
Tupu is a non-profit initiative to offer free mentorship to women, people of color, and LGBT in the tech industry.
Become a mentor
You can help support diversity in tech
If you are thinking that it’s too early in your career to be a mentor, it’s probably not true. A lot of successful mentorship relationships work at almost a peer level. If you are thinking that you don’t have much advice to give, that is definitely not true! The sum of your experiences is the most valuable thing you have and you can use it to help others. Seeing a mentee grow in their careers can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll experience in your career. And we hear all the time that the mentors are learning just as much from their mentees.
Be part of the solution
Statistics say that close to 56 percent of women with engineering degrees either leave the profession or never enter the field, and women quit jobs in tech at twice the rate that men do. By mentoring a woman, you can help them stay in tech and have a successful career. Helping one or two persons might not seem like much, but direct 1-1 time is incredibly valuable, and this person will then mentor others, which at their turn will help even more people.
FAQ for mentors
How much time do I need to invest in this?
It’s mostly up to you, but we recommend 30 minutes every 2 weeks with each mentee or 60 minutes per month. You’ll be able to choose a time that is convenient for you, so the impact on your schedule is minimized.
What qualifications do I need to be a mentor?
You need to be working in the tech industry for at least 2 years. We’re looking for mentors in any type of role (software engineer, SRE, UX, manager, product manager, tech writer, marketing, etc) and every experience level (from junior to VP or C level).
How does it work?
Once you submit the form to become a mentor, we’ll contact you in case we need more information or if we’d like to learn more about your preferences. Based on that, we’ll offer you one or two mentees to choose from. After we put you in contact with your selected mentee, we are mostly out of the way, unless you or the mentee asks for our help.
The meetings themselves happen over video conference (Zoom or Google Meet). The mentor is responsible for scheduling the recurring 1:1 meetings with the mentee. We are happy to provide you with some general tips and discussion points, but you are free to organize the structure and the frequency of the sessions together with the mentee to best fulfill their needs.
Am I being paid for doing this?
No, we want for this mentorship to be free of charge for the underrepresented groups in tech, so we are looking for volunteers to be mentors.
How do we match mentors with mentees?
The mentee can either choose their mentor or let us find the best mentor for them. In the first case, the mentee can request one or multiple mentors from the list, and depending on the availability of the mentor we can make that happen. In the second case, the mentee just needs to sign in as a mentee. To do the matching, we rely on the information that you and the mentees give us to understand your experiences, motivation, and special requests. It is therefore great if you can give us more details. We do the matching manually, there’s no magical algorithm.
What if I no longer want to be a mentor for a particular mentee?
We get it, not all mentor-mentee relationships work out, and it’s better not to force such a relationship. Also, it’s possible that you simply no longer have the time or energy to do these sessions. We are making it very easy for you to get out of the sessions and we’ll look for another mentor for the mentee.
Can I be both a mentor and a mentee?
Yes, absolutely! We found that people make the most of the experience when they both share their experiences and learn from the experience of other mentors. We’d gladly help finding the right mentor for you, just tell us what you are looking for.