MentorMEd

Awardees: Nanda Lucky Prasetya (HMS), Candrika Dini (HMS), Stephanie Hardjo (HGSE), and Jane Tjahjono (HKS)

Summary: MentorMEd is a phone apps (which works almost like the dating apps) for mentorship combining mutual ‘like’ feature and matching tags percentage. Users will be asked for their expectation and commitment in mentorship and can use plenty of tags. Computer will calculate how many tags are matched for those two parties. Users also will be given choices about prospective mentor/mentee which they can choose to like or dislike. If both parties like each other, they will match and go to the Talk Zone when they can talk but the identity including the degree and institution will be concealed to reduce bias.

The problem starts from the conceptors of the apps that feels that it is hard to find mentor/collaborator for project. Medical students (in Indonesia), postgrad students may need to do thesis. Finding mentor the old way by connecting dots by dots and through hard time scheduling is not efficient. This single platform, starts from smaller community and hopefully worldwide platform, is visioned to be the largest and biggest mentorship matching platform for medical community which will catalyze the research through real passion and curiosity. Bias will be set aside, but preferences will be still acknowledged. Bias such as photo (which may bias for swiping like), name (which a person can google to just find the other information) will be concealed until they are match, talk, and agree to unconcealed. Sometimes collaborators have another motivation (for example: Want to find job in a country, want to enter one big institution, want a dating etc) besides passion for a particular research topic. This platform will try to reduce those other bias in motivation and bring the value that research should come from original passion and original curiosity