We have received 23 applications so far to Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring
program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June
2007. All application materials are due 24 November 2006.
5 of the 23 applications have been completed but 3 others have been disqualified. All
three were disqualified for being too junior for an Established Staff term, which
requires among other criteria that participants be at Principal level (Sun U.S.
grade 9 equivalent) or above.
In addition to Sun CTO
Greg Papadopoulos sending email to Sun Engineering worldwide announcing this
SEED term, I have also
sent emails to a variety of subgroups, including GENO (Sun’s Global Engineering Org.),
and Sun’s “Employee Resource Groups”. ERG used to be called affinity groups or
diversity groups, all of which is HR talk for “a network of Sun employees who
share a common identity, characteristic, or set of interests”.
A book from which I have learned a great deal is Unlocking the Clubhouse,
Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. In addition to
reading the book and keeping it handy for reference, I have been honored to talk
with each of the authors several different times. Dr. Allan Fisher is the former
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at Carnegie Mellon and is now the
President, CEO, and co-Founder of iCarnegie.
Dr. Jane Margolis is a social scientist now with the
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.
In Unlocking the Clubhouse (ISBN: 0262632691, published in 2001),
I have found a number of specific and helpful suggestions. The book is
focussed on women in computing but the suggestions seem to work well for a wide
variety of groups. The passage I have read most recently is on p.115 (Chapter
7: A Tale of 240 Teachers):
-
Recruiting Girls
Rule number one, then, is that teachers have to deliberately focus
effort on recruiting girls. If teachers issue a generic recruitment call,
boys turn out. Girls must know that the teacher is talking to them. Sometimes
all it takes is a few minutes of encouragement to fire a girl’s interest and
to give her confidence to take a class.
…Girls do not want to be the only one in the class, so two mottoes emerged:
“Recruit friendship circles” and “Recruit a posse”.
Both of these suggestions (sending targeted invitations rather than only generic
recruitment calls, and also recruiting groups who can then support each other) have
worked very well in the SEED program. Since 2004, SEED has held a number of
“pilot” terms focussed on target groups in Engineering.
Most of those pilots were for staff in a particular geographic area (India,
China, Czech Rep., France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, and Russia) but we also
recently had a pilot SEED term for stars and rising stars among the Engineering
staff Sun acquired with StorageTek.
Holding pilot terms helps to build interest for later regular worldwide SEED terms
also. So far in this SEED application period, we have applications from:
- Central USA: 2 [ 9% ]
- China: 1 [ 4% ]
- Czech Republic: 1 [ 4% ]
- EMEA: 1 [ 4% ]
- Eastern USA: 3 [ 13% ]
- Russia: 1 [ 4% ]
- United Kingdom: 1 [ 4% ]
- Western USA: 12 [ 52% ]
- no response: 1 [ 4% ]
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