The 110 new participants in Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring program
are now working on their Mentor Wish Lists, due on 3 December. 14 of them
have already submitted their mentor requests. Creating the Mentor Wish List
is probably the hardest part of the SEED program.
The SEED Engineering mentoring program takes a long-term view and does not have a preference for one kind of learning over another. That is, the mentoring partnership learning does not have to have anything to do with the participant’s current job. Some people want to learn to be better technical managers, others want to know how to get their ideas to customers faster. Many want to improve their soft skills: public presentation or speaking, negotiating, conflict management, and coaching. Still others want to improve their work and family balance and still have a great career. It takes time and mature consideration to work through all of this. In creating their Mentor Wish List, each SEED participant needs to
make two hard decisions:
- What they want to learn
- Who has already accomplished the kind of things they want to do
(that is, who is already down the path that they see themselves walking)
SEED provides a list of over 430 senior and executive staff who are eligible
and willing to be mentors. Most have provided their biographies,
personal web page links, blog links, and other background information to give
program participants context. Researching potential mentors is like writing
a university paper – hunting for leads, backtracking, looking for key words, hunting again. Most SEED participants spend many days creating their Mentor Wish Lists.
Sometimes the fastest way to find biographical information on someone (both inside Sun’s public web pages and on the public net itself) is to use an internet search. Search results will show if the potential mentor has a Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networking page and if there is a blog associated with them. I advise
SEED participants to search for information about themselves first, to give them an idea of what is out there.
For example, a Google search of “Katy Dickinson” produced 3,590 results with
links to individual blog entries plus:
Katy Dickinson in The People at Sun Labs/CTO
Blogger: User Profile: Katy Dickinson (not sure why this is
hit #2 since I don’t use Blogger and the page is empty)
Katy Dickinson » Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
(I am on the ABI Advisory Board)
Katy Dickinson | Facebook
katy.dickinson’s Profile on icanhascheezburger (I didn’t know I had
a profile here but I do like that photo of my cat)
Katy Dickinson – ACM author profile page
Katy Dickinson’s Public Profile on Plaxo
Katy Dickinson – LinkedIn (I have a LinkedIn account but this is someone else
with my name!)
Which is to say, there is a great deal of public information available on anyone
who has even a small presence in the world.
More?
More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program
is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/
KatysBlog 