{"id":5242,"date":"2022-12-20T15:12:37","date_gmt":"2022-12-20T23:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/?p=5242"},"modified":"2022-12-29T16:51:03","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T00:51:03","slug":"the-mentoring-class-of-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/the-mentoring-class-of-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mentoring Class of 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(Meeps, one of our seven cats, helping with the selection process&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/IMG_4709-rotated-e1671577774701.jpg\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-5243 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/IMG_4709-rotated-e1671577774701-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/IMG_4709-rotated-e1671577774701-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/IMG_4709-rotated-e1671577774701.jpg 336w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a>Since my first round of community mentoring back in 2015, when I mentored 54 people for six months, I\u2019ve been asked periodically whether I\u2019d do it again. My answer was always something like \u2018maybe \u2013 it was a lot of work\u2019 and I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d have the time. Then when the pandemic hit in 2020 I wanted something apart from vegetable gardening to help my mental health, so I did another round of mentoring that stretched through the end of 2021. I&#8217;d resolved myself to not doing it again for a few years, but after going to PASS in November, and meeting face-to-face some of my former mentees I changed my mind and put out a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/mentoring-2023-want-some-help-from-me\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">call for mentees<\/a> on December 1st.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Why do I do it? I love mentoring people. Microsoft trained me to be a people manager, as that was something I really wanted to do as part of my career. I was also part of the cross-company mentoring program within Microsoft, where I mentored random people from outside my management chain.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The rules for entry were very clear: post a link to a \u2018good\u2019 blog post as a comment on my post. No blog post link, not a valid entry. One of the reasons I make this a rule is that it encourages people to start a blog or to reboot a blog that\u2019s been languishing, and it worked well again! It also shows that those who want to be mentored are willing to put in some effort. You can read all the entries in the comments of the post I linked to earlier.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">33 people posted a link and I\u2019d decided to mentor 15 people. After narrowing down the pool, the list of people who qualified is:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li>Wondi Wolde<\/li>\n<li>Anoop Agarwal<\/li>\n<li>Vijay Samevadam<\/li>\n<li>Yibo<\/li>\n<li>Deepti Nayak<\/li>\n<li>Rupen Anjaria<\/li>\n<li>Marcin Wilczek<\/li>\n<li>Vladimir<\/li>\n<li>Simon Frazer<\/li>\n<li>Sree Nair<\/li>\n<li>Cristian Lefter<\/li>\n<li>Jeff McDonald<\/li>\n<li>Pedro Trejo<\/li>\n<li>Mihailo Joksimovic<\/li>\n<li>Lena B Oksa<\/li>\n<li>Maria Bermudes<\/li>\n<li>Radek Gaska<\/li>\n<li>Gerald Wilkinson<\/li>\n<li>Leon Spangenberg<\/li>\n<li>Lucia<\/li>\n<li>Matt Zuberko<\/li>\n<li>Mike Biasetti<\/li>\n<li>Jason Romans<\/li>\n<li>Ben Fedit<\/li>\n<li>Damien Jones<\/li>\n<li>Tim Lewis<\/li>\n<li>Mark<\/li>\n<li>Peter Doyle<\/li>\n<li>Sushant<\/li>\n<li>Josh Handler<\/li>\n<li>Jangack<\/li>\n<li>Amy Abel<\/li>\n<li>Arun Gupta<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Wait &#8211; that&#8217;s not 15 names, that&#8217;s 33 names! That\u2019s right \u2013 I\u2019ll be mentoring everyone who had a valid entry. I just couldn\u2019t in all good conscience randomly exclude someone who wants some help and went to the effort of applying \u2013 I\u2019m a sucker for helping people :-)<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The second test for all the people on the list above is that they have to <a href=\"mailto:paul@sqlskills.com?subject=Mentoring Class of 2023\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">send me an email<\/a> using the link in this post, preferably from a non-work email address (as we\u2019ll likely end up discussing your work), by the end of December. You don\u2019t need to say anything in the email \u2013 I just need an email address to contact you to kick things off \u2013 and for those people who were anonymous, you can stay anonymous if you want, just let me know which of the anonymous names you are.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I\u2019ll send the initial emails to everyone on January 1st or 2nd.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Congratulations to everyone on the list \u2013 it\u2019s going to be fun!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Meeps, one of our seven cats, helping with the selection process&#8230;) Since my first round of community mentoring back in 2015, when I mentored 54 people for six months, I\u2019ve been asked periodically whether I\u2019d do it again. My answer was always something like \u2018maybe \u2013 it was a lot of work\u2019 and I didn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Mentoring Class of 2023 - Paul S. Randal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/the-mentoring-class-of-2023\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Mentoring Class of 2023 - Paul S. Randal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Meeps, one of our seven cats, helping with the selection process&#8230;) Since my first round of community mentoring back in 2015, when I mentored 54 people for six months, I\u2019ve been asked periodically whether I\u2019d do it again. 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