Katy Dickinson

13 out of 70 SEEDs Matched So Far

The SEED Engineering mentoring program is in the matching cycle for its 70 participants (Recent Hires and Established Staff) in the 2007-2008 worldwide terms. Mentor Wish Lists (15 prioritized potential mentor names with detailed reasons for preference) were due at 9 a.m. yesterday. Yesterday and today, I sent out the first 70 personalized email invitations, each going to the highest priority eligible mentor from the participant's Mentor Wish List. So far, 13 mentors have accepted the proposed match. It will take one to two months to match everyone but this is a good start.

There were almost 300 unique potential mentors requested on this term's Mentor Wish Lists. 7 of those had multiple 1st Priority requests. About 60 potential mentors were requested by 5 or more mentees. The potential mentor with the most individual requests received 23. Deciding between duplicate requests is tricky. If a mentor is requested at the same priority level by more than one person, the more senior requestor gets preference. (We had one Distinguished Engineer requested at Priority #1 by three Senior Staff Engineers plus a Staff Engineer. It was a hard choice.) If the requestors have the same seniority, we compare their reasons for wanting that mentor.

This term, Tanya Jankot added error checking to the Mentor Wish List web form, so we had many fewer participants requesting unavailable potential mentors. This means that fewer top slots were wasted and I was able to invite 56 potential mentors from the #1 priority slot. Happily, we got only two requests on this term's Mentor Wish Lists for people who no longer work for Sun.

More information on SEED is available at http://research.sun.com/SEED/

Posted at 09:22PM Jul 10, 2007 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |