The mentor matching cycle for the PreSEED program participants
started on 19 February. That is, the first email invitations went
out that day. Ten are matched so far with four additional
potential Mentors having responded that they are considering it.
If PreSEED follows the same pattern as the older SEED mentoring
program, Participants may be considered by as many as six potential Mentors
before a good match is found. Others are immediately matched with their first
choice. Each potential Mentor may have multiple email, phone, or
personal contacts with the program staff. Potential Mentors are
contacted serially in priority order and each one may take a long time
to respond and then decide. It may take about six
weeks to match all of the current PreSEED Participants.
The Participant is not kept informed of each step in the match process.
They will not know which potential Mentor from their “Mentor Wish List” is
contacted. 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.
PreSEED is a pilot of the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program.
More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/
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