Possibilities

Today was another day of opening new possibilities. It was Friday, and I started out the day with a meeting with Michael Garringer and his colleagues from the National Mentoring Center. I had spoken with Michael during my project development about the idea of a research handbook for mentoring professionals. He was very supportive of the idea and helped me write the project into the fellowship budget.

Today, I visited with Michael and his colleagues and we talked about the possibilities of such a guidebook. After talking with them in detail, it actually seems that such a manual would fill an unmet need. There are many mentoring programs around the country being started without any idea of the existing research on mentoring programs. There also seem to be a lot of professionals in the field who could use a guide to help them understand how to read research papers and also gain a better grasp of research principles that can be adapted into their everyday work. There have been a few attempts to synthesize the research into salient bits for practitioners, but the field seems to lack more of a practical, how-to guide to bringing research more fully into program practice.

It was exciting to talk to the friendly folks at the NMC and think about the possibilities of the guidebook. They loaned me some materials from their library and invited me back to use their facilities if I needed them. I hope to get a good sense of what resources are available in general to the mentoring field, so that I can do the best I can not to duplicate something that's already been published.

I also had the first meeting of my colleagues in the independent study group that Tom has put together. I will be meeting with Tom and two graduate students once a week to discuss research articles that we're reading and other projects. We're going to start out grounding ourself in some of the mentoring research, and then work to incorporate readings on each of our areas of interest. This group will help further our individual projects, but also I think create some great synergy between the four of us. I can already sense that this will be a dynamic group and create more possibilities of inquiry for me during my fellowship.

I closed the day at a potluck party held at the home of my office, the Regional Research Institute. It was nice to meet some of the people I will be seeing on a daily basis and break bread with them. Unfortunately, I couldn't make anything, but I did happen upon a breathtaking chocolate store a few blocks from the office. And even better, the chocolate bar that I brought was barely touched, so I have leftovers for weekend munching!

I'm not sure if it has to do with the fellowship, but I feel like I'm entering a more creative phase in my life. Just last week, I entered a poetry contest in Juneau. I've never submitted a poem for anything before. This contest is one that results in poetry being placed in Juneau's buses. I always love reading poetry on the bus. And this weekend, I am working on a video to submit to a local film festival in Juneau. Maybe it's just coincidence that all this productivity is happening as I start my fellowship, but I don't think so. I hope that I can find more creative outlets throughout this fellowship and beyond.