Scholar X Mentee Experience — 3

First of all, let me give you a brief introduction to the Scholar X mentoring program. Scholar X is a 6-month free premium mentoring program specifically designed for the Sri Lankan university student community. My mentor for this session is Dr Charith Peris, who is currently employed as a research scientist at Amazon Alexa. He graduated from the University of Colombo and completed his PhD at Northeastern University, USA while holding a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In recent sessions, we mainly focused on the higher education paths that I can take, and how should I prepare for them. He gave me some great insight into the difference between doing only an MSc compared to doing a PhD. We also discussed how to bring my CV and my LinkedIn profile up to the standards as well. Other than that Dr Charith helped me to prepare a proposal for the Longevity Design Challenge 2022 organized by Stanford University, USA. Also in the final sessions, we had an interesting discussion about the concept of Metaverse, how it will impact the technology industry and how I can prepare more for that.

The knowledge I got from our discussion these meetings helped me realize certain things that I haven’t thought of earlier. Before I finish I would like to thank the Sustainable Education Foundation for allowing me to gain this invaluable experience.