Yesterday, Tanya Jankot and I put together our working contact list from
the 33 prioritized Mentor Wish Lists which came in earlier this week
from the new SEED participants in Tel Aviv and St. Petersburg.
Once all the lists were in, my first task was to call potential mentors
who were asked for at a highest priority level by more than one person to
find out if they had a preference. One of those mentors took both
participants who asked for her, two others took one each, the last
was not available.
If I was not able to reach a particularly popular mentor, we went with the
most senior of the requestors. This term, although there were more than ten
potential mentors for whom there were five to a dozen requests, we only
had four with two highest priority requests each. It gets really tricky
when we have three or four top requests for the same person.
Once the top priority conflicts were sorted out, Tanya and I started at the end
of the alphabet by surname (last term we started at the beginning of
the alphabet) to see which was the highest priority mentor on each list
who was not known to be unavailable. This required:
- Removing names of a few requested Mentors who already indicated
privately that they are unavailable to act as a Mentor. - Removing the names of Mentors who were matched with a Participant before the program started (none this term) or who are still working with a SEED
participant from a prior term (lots of those this term). - Removing names of requested Mentors who do not meet the minimum
seniority requirement (only one this term).
When all that was done, we had created the working contact list.
Then, I sent out my first 33 emails. Contacting potential SEED mentors
is a serial process.
That is, I contact one potential mentor from each Wish List at a time and
each has up to a week to respond. I do not contact all of the potential
mentors for a participant in parallel.
So far, I have 5 confirmed matches (3 yesterday afternoon
and evening, and 2 this morning), and a half dozen additional expressions of
interest. I estimate this whole process will take about 6 weeks.
KatysBlog 