Wow, look at that poll. 176 people wanting mentors (most of them in person!) and only 46 willing to do so. Of course, the poll has been running for FOUR YEARS so that might have some effect on the numbers. Heck, the college freshmen that voted in year one of this poll are probably done now.
I would love to see how Matthew's trial run worked out. I'd love to have him post right after this to say that it was super successful, but the silence from the western front tells me it probably petered out about 6 weeks after it started. I don't mean to knock Matthew or his skill with mentoring here. He's a wonderful SM and I give him props for jumping in and giving this a shot. But I have been doing this SM website thing for 12 years now and have learned how these things work out.
SMNet's prior mentoring program failed badly, and looking at this thread I can see why. A lot of folks in the thread above are saying what they'd like to get OUT of a mentorship, but not anything about how they envision this happening. This leaves us with:
1. Pair up students with mentors
2.
?
3. Magically transform students into professional stage managers!
When we've tried to do this before we've run into the same problem over and over. The two sides have grossly different expectations and it all ends in tears, and the staff winds up having to chase down mentors and students for progress reports forever. Admittedly last time we tried about a decade ago, but even so, the root causes of our problems are still the same.
I think there's a general conception of a kind of "Big Brothers/Big Sisters" sort of fostering program, or something akin to a professor/student advisor relationship that many colleges offer. Happy smiling stage managers poring over prompt books together and whispering secrets in each others ears. Some sort of combination of "Good Will Hunting" and "Finding Forrester" and, heaven forfend, "Oleanna." All well and good, but
this is an internet forum. Our members are spread out all over the world. Some of our most vocal members are no longer actively SMing.
The SMA UK has only managed to put together a mentorship program this year. The US SMA has a Mentoring committee but mentoring is not mentioned at all in the US SMA's recruitment materials. This tells me it isn't a very robust program. If the paid-membership based associations with committees and dues can't pull it off, how can we do so with no budget and no real world contingent?
For me to be willing to put SMNetwork's name on it, it would have to be a quality endeavor that really focused on refining the skills of young stage managers. I'd want to see curriculum design, monthly and quarterly check-ins, staff supervision, interviews, resumes and possibly grading. Now, the internship survey that we just released was in the planning for 3 years, took nearly a full month of me doing nothing but code for 12-18 hours at a stretch, and another month of me coding 4-6 hrs per day to get the thing tested, bugfixed and launched. That is merely a fraction of what would be involved in developing code to handle a forum-driven mentorship program and track it properly. If it's what we need and I think it can be done properly I'm happy to work on the code, but I need something more concrete to work from.
So, bearing in mind that a professional stage manager is not a trained educator... bearing in mind that SMNetwork is a donation-driven web forum ... bearing in mind the kind of labor that would be involved in getting it running, let alone keeping it going... bearing in mind that anyone volunteering to mentor would be doing so in and around their work schedule...
Students requesting mentorship, how exactly do you see your mentor helping you? What sort of things would you want your mentor to teach you? I mean, do you just want an email buddy to vent to? Do you want them to go through your notes from college and cross out anything that doesn't apply in the real world? Do you want them to find you a job? Do you want them to tell you stories of what life is like? Do you want them to invite you backstage and let you call the show? Let's get specific here. If what you guys are expecting is realistic, we can talk behind the scenes about giving this a shot. However, if students are expecting things that can only be accomplished with magic fairy dust, we really need to kill this idea rather than getting people's hopes up for another 4 years.
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