Yes, Cats.

I’ve been running mentoring trainings for the Dietrich College Career Mentoring Program this week, which is one of the projects I manage at Carnegie Mellon’s Career Center. We got 18 wonderful student and alum mentors (including 2 Teach For America corps members, 2 former Obama campaign staffers, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and some generous undergraduates) and 12 lucky mentees, including a student from our Qatar campus (yes, some of them get 2 mentors). For anyone keeping track, my college at Carnegie Mellon used to be named “The College of Humanities and Social Sciences” and got renamed last fall to “Dietrich College” because of a fantastic donation to the school.

Given the choice, I will be silly in public. Also, I will never use bullet points on a slide show. My presentation had 2 pictures: one of Dumbledore and one of Athena as Mentor. I took 45 minutes to cover the basics of mentoring, shamelessly plugging my Mom’s work running Sun Microsystem’s mentoring program for 10 years, introducing the mentors to their mentees’ resumes, and showing them the resources they can connect their mentees to. I used two slides and lots of web browsing.

At the very end of my presentation, I showed the mentors one last resource: the tumblr I’ve developed for the class I’m teaching for the second time, “How to Get a Job.” Here was the first image they saw:

First day of class—don’t be scared.