I recently attended the Early Career Women in STEMM Paper and Grant Writing Workshop, co-sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science, which aimed at providing mentoring, career guidance and scientific writing support for women in STEMM. The workshop spanned for three days from 4 to 6 November 2020.

On the first two days, we had the opportunity to listen to and engage in active discussions with six senior academic mentors from diverse fields. The speakers explained the writing and review processes in detail, for scientific grants (under both ARC and NHMRC schemes), as well as for scientific papers. The talks and discussions also included some other very important aspects for academics such as teaching and work-life balance. The second day of the workshop concluded with a networking session involving all participants. The mentors for the third day were four young academics who discussed both academic and alternate pathways one could potentially take after their doctoral and postdoctoral training in the academia.

The workshop had been planned with extensive attention to detail by the wonderful organising committee: Dr Helen Xu from UTS, Dr Ziyuan Li from ANU, Dr Helen McGuire from USyd and Dr Sophia Gu from UNSW). I’m quite thankful to the committee, to all speakers and sponsors for this valuable opportunity.