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/
KatysBlog 