ANDREA MARUŠÁKOVÁ Role: senior tester Area:  IT Employer: BTL Medical Technologies s.r.o. What can I help my mentee with? identifying and organizing priorities knowing how to manage yourself take an active approach to work finding motivation how to create the conditions for deep work

In high school, Andrea's learning always went well on her own, she didn't have to work too hard and she thrived with honors. She enjoyed maths, studying foreign languages and was interested in computer games. So she chose the Faculty of Information Technology at CTU for further studies, where she was hit quite hard after high school. She found that college was largely about self-study, which she found challenging - she didn't know how to learn effectively. After a year, she dropped out of school and applied to study tourism at the University of Economics. But she eventually chose the challenge again and ended up back at CTU in Biomedical Engineering, where she finally found herself and ended up using the knowledge and skills from FIT. When she was looking for a part-time job to join the school, she saw an offer for a software tester position at BTL. The position, despite her misgivings (from school, Andrea felt she should go to work in a hospital) was appealing, and she eventually took it and stayed on full time after completing her Master's degree.

"I'm a person who doesn't like to be bored at work, so as soon as there was an opportunity to take on some extra responsibility, I didn't say no." So she gradually added other responsibilities such as automated test programming, documentation and translation to her regular job as a tester, which involves testing the application and verifying requirements. Naturally, she fell into the position of "test lead" and acts as a liaison for all colleagues in the department, as well as training new ones. She sees this as a hugely profitable investment - if she is thoroughly involved with a person and they learn the activity well, she herself will have less work to do in the future. Moreover, she likes to see someone move on thanks to her.In her spare time, she enjoys reading books on personal development, which is what her perfectionism has led her to do in the first place. "A lot of people take perfectionism as an enviable trait, everyone appreciates it, your boss praises you, but internally it eats you up. You keep piling on more work, and if you really want to do it properly, then it's just too much - a typical example of toxic perfectionism." In mentoring, Andrea hopes that by sharing her experiences she can help the student with his/her own direction and also sees the programme as a space to meet new people, which she misses after graduation.