It’s almost summer! How do I know? because all the summer students arrived at IBM this week and went through their orientation etc. That means that are really no more empty spaces here at the lab, although hopefully the parking lot will get emptier (since people go on vacation, and students don’t drive…usually).

This is worthy of a blog because this year, our team has a co-op, and I get to be the “Connections Coach”. At other companies, I think a co-op would have a mentor, but even though we have the mentoring concept at IBM, coop’s aren’t assigned a mentor. Instead, their Connections Coach is the go-to person to get them up to speed (i.e., installing software, getting access to stuff). It’s a bit weird really, because there is no assigned mentor; so either the entire team has to fill that role or they get the shaft.

Most of the co-ops or IIPs (16 month terms) start in the summer. There were about 150-200 people starting this week. Now, if you were in charge of matching up these ~150 people to their 100 Connection Coaches, what do you think would be the most efficient way to do it? I know that our method of sitting all 150 people in a room and the having each Connection Coach come up one-by-one to the stage and announce the name of their co-op out loud is not high on that list…