Frequently asked questions

The SharpestMinds Income Share Agreement (ISA) is an agreement between you and a mentor. The mentor invests in you by guiding you through a project aimed at developing your industry-critical skills. In return for mentorship, you agree to pay your mentor a small percentage of your first-year salary after you land a full-time job in a relevant field.

Mentorship is an investment that a mentor makes in you. Our ISA makes that explicit by giving your mentor a stake in your future success. It also gives you the chance to get expert technical and career help from industry professionals, even if you can't afford to pay for that help up-front.
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Because you only pay if the mentorship works, our incentives and the mentor's are aligned with yours. We all want the same thing: for you to succeed and get a high-paying job. That alignment is what results in a true, productive partnership.

We don't require a degree or experience, but we do expect you to have a fairly solid base of knowledge in data science. The mentorship is aimed at refining those skills for an easier transition into industry.
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If you aren't sure what your chances are, ask us! You can message our team on chat, or reach out by email at contact@sharpestminds.com.

Yes! At the beginning of your mentorship, we will:
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- Review your resume, LinkedIn profile, and personal website.
- Give you a handbook of tactics to optimize your progress through each stage of the job hunt, from applications to salary negotiation.
- Connect you to mentees with similar technical skills and/or career goals for weekly office hours.
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During your mentorship, we will:
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- Help you set and track weekly goals.
- Closely monitor the number of applications, interviews, and offers your get, and reach out if we notice you're not getting the traction we expect.
- Host frequent webinars and office hours that you can drop in on to chat with a member of the SharpestMinds team and other mentees.

Yes. All of our mentorships are remote by default. If you and your mentor happen to be in the same city, we'd normally encourage you to connect in person - unfortunately, due to the current pandemic, we have to recommend against that at the moment.

If you're hired in a technical position within 24 months of your mentorship, you'll repay a percentage of your first-year salary that you'll agree on with your mentor in advance.
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Anywhere from 5% to 10% is typical, depending on the mentor's time commitment and other factors. SharpestMinds adds a 3% fee to this.
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If you aren't hired in a qualifying position within 24 months, you never pay anything.

After you submit your application, you can request to chat with any mentor, and they'll accept if they're interested in you. If you and a mentor are interested in each other, we'll set up an online chat from which you can book an interview.
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If the mentor thinks you're promising after the interview, they can make you a formal offer, which will include the mentor's time commitment and fee.

Our mentors are data science and machine learning professionals who have established themselves in their industry. They're employees and alumni from AI groups at Apple, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, and other similar companies.
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We screen all our mentors carefully to ensure quality. You'll also get the chance to interview your mentor yourself before you commit.

The skills you'll work on will vary depending on your current skillset and interests.

Normally you'll focus on industry best practices in deploying ML models to production, devops, writing clean code, and doing proper data engineering and data cleaning.

If you don't land a job in data science or a related field within 24 months of completing the program, you won't owe the mentor or SharpestMinds anything.

Your mentor will guide you through a full-stack machine learning project over a period of time that you'll decide on together. This is usually anywhere from 4 to 16 weeks, depending on the project and your experience level.
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The mentor will provide support via office hours, code review, and general advice/guidance. SharpestMinds will check in regularly to ensure things are running smoothly. You'll have access to our Slack workspace with other mentors, mentees, and SharpestMinds admins, ensuring 24/7 support.

In most cases, your project will involve building a full-stack machine learning pipeline: that means data collection and cleaning; building and training a model; and deployment with a working front-end. However, if you prefer to use your time differently, for example by focusing 100% on interview prep, that may be fine too - ask your mentor when you interview them.

You'll still be asked to repay the mentorship fee. We want to ensure that our mentors are incentivized to see you hired as soon as you start, regardless of context.
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However, you can request to defer repayment once you've started a job if your mentor agrees. Many mentees who land internships find it useful to defer repayment until they're hired in a full time position.

If you already have a job but you want to go through the mentorship program anyway, please contact us via contact@sharpestminds.com and we'll review your case manually.
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Keep in mind that any technical job you hold at the end of the mentorship could qualify for repayment, so if you already have a job it's much better to let us know in advance.

An offer of mentorship always includes the percentage of your first year's salary that you'll repay to your mentor. That percentage will get paid out by credit card in monthly instalments over the course of your first 12 months of employment.

No. You don't owe SharpestMinds, or any mentors anything until you accept an official mentorship offer. You can browse mentors and message them free of charge.

We want our mentors (and ourselves) to be incentivized at all times to get you hired, even if that means getting you hired more quickly than you expect.
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If you get hired part of the way through your mentorship, the ISA will still apply - which means you'll still need to reimburse your mentor. Your mentor still owes you the mentorship hours they promised you at the beginning of the mentorship, and you can use that time to either finish your project or get ramped up faster at your new job. As usual, SharpestMinds will also help you with salary negotiation, whether you get a job offer during your mentorship or afterwards.

Unfortunately not. Right now, SharpestMinds only operates only in Canada and the United States.
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We classify your location based on where you live at the time you're applying for the mentorship, rather than based on your citizenship or where you intend to apply for jobs. That means that if you're located in the USA when you apply, you might be eligible even if you're a citizen of another country.
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If you're in the USA or Canada on a visa, you might be eligible for the program depending on the specifics of your situation. Feel free to reach out to us over email at contact@sharpestminds.com, and we'll help you figure out whether you're eligible.
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If you'd like us to let you know when we launch in your region, email us at contact@sharpestminds.com.

Broadly speaking, any role in which you'd use knowledge that's typically taught during a mentorship. So for example, a data analyst or data engineering role would qualify, because a lot of what mentors teach is highly relevant to software engineering. But a sales role at a tech company ordinarily wouldn't qualify, because even though you might be working at a tech company, sales positions typically don't incorporate much of what's taught during a mentorship.