Katy Dickinson

SEED Matching Update, SEED LinkedIn Group

We are 13 days into the SEED mentor matching cycle for the two January-June 2009 terms. So far, 61 program participants are matched (that's 56% of the 109 total participants). The remaining 48 are under consideration by potential mentors from their Mentor Wish Lists. My December email file for SEED already has 1,235 emails in it.

Matching has been slower than for a usual term. By the second week of a normal SEED mentor matching cycle, we usually have 75% of participants matched. This slowed matching is probably due to two causes: 1) We have about double the number of participants than are usually matched at this time of year; 2) I decided to ask all but the most senior and experienced mentors to have a pre-match discussion with their potential mentee before I declare the match. The restructuring that Sun announced last month will be starting soon. In these stressful times, I want to be sure that these mentoring pairs are a particularly good fit for each other. Only about 1/3 of the participants in these terms are based in the USA, so pre-match discussions take a while to set up.

Yesterday, I started an experiment which I hope will improve SEED communications. I set up a group for SEED Engineering Mentoring mentees, mentors, and managers on LinkedIn. I announced the group to the SEEDs last night and in less than a day, I have approved 163 requests to join.

Why do this? Year after year, the most frequent request from SEED applicants and participants is for more information about potential SEED mentors. Keeping good records on the 445 SEED potential mentors is time-consuming, and the resulting list is always incomplete and a little out of date, despite our best efforts.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site which can be used as a self-updating professional address book. By creating the new SEED group on LinkedIn, SEED and PreSEED mentees, mentors, and managers can link to each other, find out about, and keep track of each other more easily. The new SEED Engineering Mentoring group is open to current and alumni SEED program mentees, mentors, and managers. That is, staff who are current and former Sun employees associated with the SEED Engineering Mentoring program.

More?
More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at http://research.sun.com/SEED/

Posted at 07:45PM Dec 16, 2008 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |