John and I fly to St. Petersburg today. The local administrator
just wrote to say that she checked with our hotel and they had
no record of our reservation so she made another. I sent her the
original reservation confirmation number from our travel agent just
to avoid duplications. She has also arranged for a car to meet us
at the airport. What a pleasure to have someone watching out for us.
Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) sent out the announcement that the
SEED term for St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv was open on 9 January.
Since then, there have been three applications, one from Israel and
three from Russia. It looks like a good group so far. All
applications are due 30 January.
As usually happens with applicants outside of the US, there is
confusion about the “Demographic Information” section of the
application form. We request demographic information from SEED
applicants so that we can conduct statistical analyses.
Providing this information is entirely voluntary. Because Sun is
based in the US, our record keeping on matters such as race is
probably specified by what the US government requires. SEED
could have a different set of categories, but then we could not
compare our data with that of the company as a whole.
Our SEED application’s list is based the racial list we found
on the Sun Employment Application form.
- African American
- Asian/Pacific Islander
- Caucasian
- Hispanic/Latino
- Native American/American Indian/Alaskan Native
- Multi-racial/Multi-ethnic
- Decline to respond
- Other: Provided in Text Box
We added “Multi-racial/Multi-ethnic” after discussion with
some SEED applicants who did not find anything on the
original list made sense for them. Probably the category that
causes the most confusion is “Caucasian”. People whom I would
consider to be in that category after I meet them often put
under “Other” such descriptions as:
- European
- French native
- Iranian/Persian/Middle-eastern
- Russian
- Slavonian
- White
For what it’s worth, one formal definition of Caucasian is “a person with
origins of the original peoples
of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East who is not of Hispanic origin.”
(from the
Governor’s Affirmative Action Office, Oregon State.
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