Yesterday, I started matching the Participants and Mentors for the SEED
Established Staff term which will run January-July 2008. I
sent out the first fifty email invitations yesterday and got two
acceptance emails immediately. We have 9 acceptances so far –
41 to go!
Everyone who is not yet matched now has the hard job of waiting patiently
for potential mentors to reply. It will take about six weeks to match all
fifty of the current SEED Participants. There will be very few matches
during the last weeks of the year since so many people are on vacation.
The matching time for each individual varies quite a bit. Some people
are matched within a day of the first SEED Mentor Request email going
out, others take the full six weeks. Each potential
Mentor may have multiple email, phone, or personal contacts with SEED
program staff. Potential Mentors are contacted serially in the priority
order given on the participant’s Mentor Wish List. Each one may take a long
time to respond and then decide. The time it takes to make a match
partially depends on the number and seniority of Participants and the
availability and seniority of the potential Mentors requested. Senior
Participants and very senior potential Mentors often take longer to match.
Senior Participants who represent the local maximum
professionally (the “go-to person” for Sun on a topic) may be
particularly difficult to match. If the Mentor and Mentee are matched
after the actual start of the term, the mentoring partnership still
lasts for six months from the match date, regardless of when the SEED
term formally ends.
I will send out email and blog updates from time to time.
The Participants are not kept informed of each step in the match process.
Potential mentors need to have space and time to consider the
possibilities of a mentoring partnership without risk of offending the
potential Mentee or interfering with future communications with them or
their manager.
More information on the SEED Engineering mentoring program is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/
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