As part of its activities at the ELSO meeting in Nice in September 2004, ELSO’s Career Development Committee tried out for the first time a Career Mentoring Lunch. With sandwich in hand, dozens of young scientists sat down at one of ten tables with two older ‘mentors’ to discuss various career issues.

The idea, modelled on the Women In Cell Biology Committee’s mentoring lunch at the annual American Society for Cell Biology meeting, is to benefit from the experience and advice of the mentors on one of the 'round-table' topics while you take your lunch break. At Nice, the lunch was provided for the participants thanks to generous sponsorship from Science Careers.

Participants signed up for the topic of their choice by e-mail before the meeting. The most popular topic, by far, was Careers in science outside academia, but other topics like Improving CV and interview techniques, Short- and long-term career aims and how to achieve them and Raising kids while pursuing a career in science were also very popular. "It’s interesting to see what people are most concerned about," says Catherine Rabouille, who organized the lunch with other members of the Career Development Committee. "It helps us to identify areas that we might cover more intensively at future ELSO meetings."

With an impressive list of mentors and plenty of keen interrogators, the session was a huge success and will be a regular feature of future ELSO meetings.