Matchathon: A guide to student-faculty connections in PhD programs

Abstract

Relevant and impactful mentors are essential to a graduate students career. Finding mentors can be challenging in umbrella programs with hundreds of faculty members. To foster connections between potential mentors and students with similar research interests, we created a Matchathon event, which has successfully enabled students to find mentors. We developed an easy-to-use R Shiny app (https://github.com/UM-OGPS/matchathon/) to facilitate matching and organizing the event that can be used at any institution. It is our hope that this resource will improve the environment and retention rates for students in the academy. The open source app is publicly available on the web (app: https://UM-OGPS.shinyapps.io/matchathon/; source code: https://github.com/UM-OGPS/matchathon/).