NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract MentorNet's Wisconsin and Hawaii Statewide Initiatives Abstract The state of Wisconsin and state of Hawaii are the only states in the nation to have offered MentorNet membership to all public universities and technical colleges. This innovative partnership highlights a new model to launch MentorNet on college campuses. MentorNet, the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science and an award-winning nonprofit e-mentoring organization, offers a proven effective means to connect students (protégés) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors with professionals (mentors) in industry, government and higher education. Since mentoring is recognized as an important engagement strategy to encourage women and girls to pursue STEM education and careers, other states can benefit from the story of the Wisconsin and Hawaii collaboration. Hawaii’s Maui Economic Development Board and Wisconsin’s Milwaukee School of Engineering have partnered under a Women in Technology grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. This grant is to encourage women and girls in rural areas to pursue STEM education and careers. Because students at the Hawaii and Wisconsin partner campuses were enthusiastic about their MentorNet experience, the Women in Technology grant funded a two-year contract to waive membership fees for MentorNet for all four-year and two-year University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin Technical College System campuses; 30 institutions could potentially participate. One of the aims of this program was to encourage more technical/community colleges to partner with MentorNet, broadening the range of mentoring opportunities for the diverse population of students who attend such schools. To promote MentorNet participation in the Wisconsin systems, a collaborative team from Hawaii, Milwaukee School of Engineering, MentorNet, the University of Wisconsin System, and the Wisconsin Technical College System held a one-day orientation training in August 2005. A hands-on training session was offered via a phone/web conference in October 2005. During the first year, 24 campuses participated. The University of Wisconsin System includes 26 campuses: 13 two-year campuses, 11 four-year campuses, two large Ph.D. granting institutions and the University of Wisconsin Extension. Of the participating University of Wisconsin campuses, a majority of the MentorNet protégés (73%) came from four-year undergraduate programs. A solid majority (83%) were female. Students at one of the University of Wisconsin four-year campuses rated MentorNet higher than the national average for the statement “I feel that my college should continue to participate in MentorNet.” The Wisconsin Technical College System has 16 colleges with 47 campuses; 12 of the 16 Wisconsin Technical College System colleges joined MentorNet in 2005 and have continued the relationship. Additionally, MentorNet created an E-Forum group specifically for technical college nontraditional students. In October 2006, the collaborative team followed up with a third MentorNet workshop for campus representatives. This paper describes the statewide initiatives of Hawaii’s and Wisconsin’s projects, including the administrative aspect, the profile, numbers and evaluations of the protégés; a comparison of the
Patient safety and quality improvement have been a driving force for many health care facilities to implement ISO 9001 in recent years. This study describes an effort to capture the ISO 9001-rollout experience of Sterile Processing Services (SPS) departments in a few pilot sites in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) system. The objective of this work was to gauge the departments' readiness to implement ISO 9001. Possible factors were identified from the literature related to ISO 9001 implementation in healthcare. A series of four questionnaires for the Nurse Executive, and the Chief, Supervisor, and Staff (or Employee) of the SPS were developed and distributed to four sites in VHA. Inspired by Cameron and Quinn's competing values framework for diagnosing organizational culture, questionnaires were designed to contrast answers from management and staff. Spider Diagrams and statistical analysis were used to find emerging trends and factors.
MentorNet is dedicated to diversifying the engineering and scientific workforce by providing e-mentoring to students in colleges and universities, with a special focus on underrepresented majors in engineering and science. It was founded in 1997 by Dr. Carol Muller, who led it as its sole President and CEO until 2008.The seeds for MentorNet were sown in 1995 when Muller, then associate dean at Dartmouth’s School of Engineering, initiated a pilot e-mentoring program as part of the campus Women in Science Project, which she had co-founded. Muller’s insight, one that has sustained MentorNet throughout its history, is that engineering and science are the engines of progress and economy in the U.S. and globally, but they are also extraordinarily challenging disciplines, and especially so for underrepresented cohorts who may be the first in their family to aspire to professional careers in engineering and science, or who may still face subtle discrimination because of their gender or ethnicity. Getting as much talent into the science and technology pipelines creates benefits for the global economy, for the institutions who need that talent, and first and foremost, for talented students themselves. Our vision, like our program, is potentially global and paradigm-changing. Our technology is a means to an important end: making and sustaining relationships across barriers of identity, race, class, age gender, ethnicity, and nationality for the benefit of talent development.
Collaboration among organizations and pooling resources may be one strategy to achieve greater results. Mentoring has been consistently highlighted as a major strategy to encourage women’s retention in engineering. In offering e-mentoring as a solution, MentorNet’s programs address the time, schedule, and distance constraints that otherwise impede mentoring relationships. By creating scalable systems to support the mentoring interests across multiple organizations, MentorNet reduces the time costs involved for individual organizations, and also builds a broader social network that engages students and professionals in mentoring relationships.
