"Definitely [recommend this mentorship program to friends]! It's a great way to meet people, learn about the latest and greatest both in academia and industry, and get career guidance." Feedback from a student mentee.

SMA first created a mentorship program for APEC 2023. For APEC 2024 & 2025, we recruited IEEE IAS & IEEE PELS to support and expand the mentorship program. Consequently, 24 students signed up for the mentorship program along with 25 unique mentors who were matched to the mentees (with special thanks for the extra mentor who coordinated efforts in the headshots room next to the mentorship room at APEC 2025).

The mentorship program has six major objectives:

1. Take advantage of APEC
2. Explore career options & directions
3. Promote self & network (socially)
4. Meet subject matter experts
5. Introduce activities & events for PSMA, IAS & PELS
6. Have fun along the way

A key element to the program is to give mentees the opportunity to understand the true diversity of hardware, software and system integration career options open related to power electronics in areas such as renewable energy, med technology, environmental monitoring, industrial automation, smart mobility, data centres, Electric Vehicles and Internet of Things. It gives them the opportunity to talk first hand with people who have worked in a wide variety of roles and map out a suite of possible career paths both in industry and academia.

Each mentee receives a mentor and a mentorship workbook with three separate phases: Pre-APEC, APEC, and Post-APEC each containing multiple suggested activities.

To encourage mentees to try activities and attend events that they normally may be reluctant to try, they would receive points. The students had to take the initiative to accumulate the most points.

Congratulations to the winners for APEC 2025:

1st Place ($500): Soham Roy, University of Texas at Austin, USA
2nd Place ($300): Hoang Le, Lakehead University, Canada
3rd Place ($200 split over tie): Mehrnaz Madadi, North Carolina State University, USA & Shiqi Zhang, Yanshan University, China

Additionally, some mentees nominated their mentors for recognition:

• Thrax Cui & Kai Li – Mean Well USA
• Justin Henspeter – IBM

Thanks to these outstanding mentors and all other mentors who volunteered to guide our rising stars of engineers!

PSMA actively worked to improve the program for APEC 2025:

1) Updated the mentorship workbook by adding a "purpose" column, aiming to better motivate students by helping them understand the benefits of each activity.
2) Simplified the prizes to facilitate international distribution.
3) Actively recruited more international mentors, especially from Asia, to better match the student distribution and address social and cultural aspects in mentoring.
4) Created a Mentorship room as a dedicated and quiet location for mentors and mentees to meet in an unfamiliar destination. We posted several career options in the room to spark more discussion.

This is just a summary of our mentorship efforts. Consider joining the PSMA Industry-Education Committee to help shape the mentorship program going forward.

Here is what one student mentee had to say about the APEC mentorship program: "Compared to other programs I've tried, this one gave more personal attention. In the past, some mentorships felt rushed or didn't offer regular contact, but APEC made sure we had real conversations and built a good relationship with our mentor."

Other positive results of the mentorship program:

1) Received specific feedback on how to improve
2) Some mentees already agreed to become mentors at a future APEC
3) Many mentees would recommend this program to friends
4) A number of mentors agreed to mentor again and would recommend this program
5) Several mentors agreed to continue the mentorship with their mentees

Interested in becoming a mentor for APEC 2026? Contact mentors@psma.com.

Most Importantly: Thank You for being a Mentor! Thanks again for giving our next generation of engineers a head start!

If you or anyone in your company is interested in getting on the distribution list for future issues of PSMA UPDATE, please send e-mail to: power@psma.com. Be sure to include your name and the name of your company.