We’ve had a mentoring program here at SQLskills for a couple of years (the brainchild of Jonathan), where each of us can pick someone who’s attended one of our Immersion Events in the past and offer to be their mentor for six months.
It’s time to kick off the fourth mentoring session. You can read about the previous mentees below:
- Session 1 (November 2011, including our reasoning for doing this): SQLskills community mentoring
- Session 2 (May 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 2
- Session 3 (November 2012): SQLskills community mentoring – round 3
This time round the team’s taking a break so only I will be mentoring someone (I love helping people, especially with career/growth). I’ll be mentoring Merrill Aldrich (b|t – definitely check out his cool post on telecommuting), who took IE1 in Chicago in 2011. In his own words:
Merrill Aldrich is a database administrator at one of the largest credit unions in the U.S., serving about 850,000 members. His primary role is as a systems/operations DBA, making the organization’s many databases safe, secure, highly available, and fast. He strives to be a change agent, improving systems and processes a little every day, until they are truly outstanding.
Merrill enjoys sharing experience with the SQL Server community online, using social media and his blog, with user groups, and by speaking at events like PASS SQL Saturday.
He is a graduate of the Rice University School of Architecture and designed buildings for many years. He became an expert in three-dimensional modeling and building information modeling (BIM) before retooling and retraining to work directly in IT. He has received a few awards, but his favorite remains the award for “Shortest Answer to a Long CAD Question,” which took the form of a corny purple trophy, given many, many years ago by teammates at his first architecture job.
Congratulations to Merrill – I’m looking forward to working with him over the next six months!
2 thoughts on “SQLskills community mentoring – round 4”
Thanks so much, Paul. I can’t wait to get started!
Cool initiative! Good luck, Merrill!