Category: Mentorship Journal

Tonight I finished up the edits that Josh had discussed with me in Thursday’s Zoom meeting. Of all the changes, I felt this one would be the most complicated so I held off on completing it until the very end. What Josh wanted were eight squares alternating between an athlete in competition and a person in a business setting. The first part of that process was to find pictures that fit the description then crop them so that they were a perfect square. Then I would have to place them onto WordPress. However, I knew that when it came to placing content, the system basically does whatever it wants. To get around that, I turned to my new friend, Photoshop Elements. You would think it was a breeze after that, I just place the pictures side-by-side and now I have a collage masterpiece.

Granted, it was a lot easier going this route than trying to do it in WordPress, but there was still the matter of sizing up each of the cropped squares so that they were all of equal height and width. Once that was complete, I had to place it on WordPress which as I alluded to earlier had its own ideas for how the strip should look on the site. I had to go in and change a setting so that it now comes clear across the bottom of the site. This is probably not the last change we make to the site, but I am good with what we have right now.

We hit a bit of a snafu with the weekly virtual meeting. I had tried to reschedule it due to a conflict and Liston’s schedule had filled up, so we went with the usual time. Thankfully, Josh showed up and we could look over the ICC website. As expected, he said several things needed to change. Things that will no doubt keep me busy as I close in on the final days of my mentorship and Masters of Business Administration studies. A few of them were edits that could be made as we worked, replacing one word with another. Others I jotted down to return to at a later time because I knew they would be complicated and did not want to slow up the proceedings by focusing on them.

One such item was adding content within the banner of the home page. The text just read “Always a champion,” which is sort of the tagline I came up with for Life After the Games because it is about athletes leaving their sport for a career. Josh wanted to add some text to it plus the new medal we put on the brochure. This would surely involve some work outside of WordPress to do, so I later made it so WordPress would not show the “Always a champion” text and created new text within the image itself using Photoshop. There was also the issue of a tint on WordPress that I had to figure out how to remove. At any rate, it is changed but will probably require further changes later. This is only one of the suggestions Josh made.

I have been biting off chunks of that gap in my hours that I have one day short of two weeks to fill. Working with gathering all of these international sports contacts has been very helpful in the process although I have to admit, it can get rather monotonous. My regimen is fairly close to a physical workout except that my breaks tend to be a little longer. I work for thirty minutes then do something else for fifteen, back to work for thirty minutes and when that’s finished, I break for another fifteen. Ultimately, three hours turns into 4.5 doing it this way, more than half of a workday, but it prevents me from hitting the proverbial wall and making silly mistakes because I am tired out.

I am getting to the point in this mentorship where I will have to start reflecting on really 3.5 years of Master’s studies, but specifically the six months I spent doing this mentorship. I also have to think about what comes after all of this and discuss it with Liston. The upcoming holiday seems like the perfect opportunity to do so. The spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday plus a couple of additional days off from my normal job I think will allow me to take stock of everything and trust me, there is a lot to take in this year. Thus I plan to consider my thoughts and start sharing them with you one week from tomorrow–Thanksgiving Day. Meanwhile, I shall continue to head toward that finish line.

Continuing on my observations from last night, I am not so worried about playing catchup to make it to 200 hours in two weeks. Between these contacts and whatever else Liston, Josh, and Dr. Tiell need to be completed in that time, I have plenty going on. My big concern now is preparing for a transition. There will be several items I need to take care of before I am fully done. One will be discussing goals for the future with Liston. I will also have to make sure this website is up-to-date with the changes we made to the website and brochure. Those two communication pieces have ultimately become my primary work in this endeavor and I am quite pleased with how they have turned out.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I should use some of my remaining hours to think about what the next student is going to need for a smooth transition and write those tasks down. What comes to mind immediately is access to the ICC website for editing purposes, control of the room I have created in Zoom for the weekly meetings, although I can see where they go mostly to phone conferences to conduct business. Lastly, I will want to hand over the Excel spreadsheet with all the contacts I have accumulated. I also have to guide them through any processes, I cannot just say, “Here you go, good luck to you.” Most of it will be pretty self-explanatory but I must impart what wisdom I have gathered in six months to my successor so they can get as much out of this project as I have.

I have been counting down the days until the end of my mentorship with the International Cultural Consortium. Do not get the wrong idea here, it is not that I am ready to be finished with it and move on. In fact, I will not know what to do with myself in the evenings once my MBA studies are over. The reason, however, that I am in countdown mode is because I have to complete 200 hours by no later than the first of December. At the start of today, I was at 163.5 hours. This gives me, by my math anyway, sixteen days to complete 36.5 hours, or an average of 2 hours 17 minutes per night. My current pace of two hours is thus not going to cover the necessary ground. I will need to pick it up slightly.

I am not all that worried about it because some of the remaining sixteen days are days I will have off: a couple of Saturdays and Sundays, then there is Thanksgiving one week from Thursday and the day after that. With the continuing pandemic, my family will not be traveling for holiday meet-ups, opting for a Zoom gathering. Plus I will still use my evenings towards looking up contacts, with other projects as they pop up. Yes, we are very close to the end, and yet there is still a lot of time and a lot left to be done, including reports that I will need to turn in for the class portion. I cannot wait to see what lies ahead during the “two-minute drill”.

Even by sports standards, this was an unusual Sunday: we had the final round of the Masters golf tournament going up against the early slate of NFL games, now CBS and Fox both have football here in the late afternoon. That is 2020 in a nutshell for you. In these past couple of weeks, I have found entering sports contacts to be very compatible with watching television because it does not take a great deal of concentration to manage both simultaneously. I am always amazed by people who can work with the radio or TV on like it is nothing. I have to think my way through what I am working on in a lot of cases and so those sounds tend to be distracting to me.

Much of it is certainly going to depend upon the work I am doing. Again, looking up e-mails and putting them into an Excel spreadsheet does not take a whole lot of effort, thus I can do that and listen to the TV at the same time. Designing the brochure or website, on the other hand, requires me to work with only my thoughts. Other people are different. Others can work through all the noise around them. In the case of athletes, they do it because they have to. Or they did before the COVID-19 pandemic anyway. With or without noise, I have gotten through a significant portion of the list and will work through as much of it as I can before all is said and done.

Here I was, thinking maybe I would go to bed a little early on this Saturday evening (11 p.m. is actually rather early for me). Then I remember that I needed to put together a brief synopsis of the day, which from an ICC standpoint consisted entirely of fixing the Meet the Team page. Dr. Tiell and I met over Zoom at ten this morning to review the present contents of the icctrainings.com website, as it remains a work in progress. The bio section was set up a certain way and she asked if we could do it differently, both of us knowing that further corrections would need to be made at a later time. Our meeting was not that long–thirty-five minutes in all. Some of the edits I could make in real-time, the others I chose to do later because it can be a complicated process.

I took a walk and a nap between that time. Some people want to just jump right in and get the job finished. I can be like that myself, but I also value leisure and find that it is better to take a break from a task then return to it with a clearer mind. This being Saturday and all made it easier to temporarily unplug than had it been during the week. It took some work on my part to completely redesign the page but I like where it is now. Again, that does not mean it will change a few more times. It is a lot easier to navigate than it was, however.

What a strange time. We just had Halloween a couple of weeks ago, followed by the U.S. elections. Now all of the sudden, it is Friday the thirteenth. Then again, most of this year has felt like one thing after another. The date notwithstanding, my morning was booked with work functions. Ever since the pandemic started, which someone on one of my social media accounts noted was right before the last Friday the thirteenth in March, I have been alternating between working at home and in the office. Some functions still require my physical presence and I had scheduled myself to take care of those this particular morning. The first thing I normally do when I get up is to check my phone for e-mails and any news that I might have missed overnight. You can take the journalist out of the newsroom, but you cannot take the newsroom out of the journalist.

One e-mail came from Dr. Tiell, asking about availability to go over the ICC website this morning. She laid out her plans between eight and eleven a.m. Eastern Time, noting she would be free at nine (B. Tiell, personal communication, November 13, 2020). I was going into the office at ten (nine-o’clock Central) and could not alter those plans but Dr. Tiell did give the option for tomorrow morning, which of course is Saturday and in the age of COVID, I do not have anything going for the day, except I do like to sleep in on days off but not too late. So I agreed to discuss the website tomorrow at 11/10c.

Another productive Thursday is in the books. We held our weekly meeting once again by telephone, which seems to work better from a technological standpoint although I was unable to use my computer as a speaker. Everyone dials into a number based here in Iowa. Fun fact: the area code, 712, is where I lived for my first six years of existence then returned to begin my professional career. The only other hiccup besides my connectivity issues was Liston having a side conversation with someone while Josh is trying to relay brochure edits to me, so it seemed to work nicely. That being said, I think instances like reviewing a visual document call for a Zoom meeting because you can share the screen with other participants, thus they see the same thing you see.

With Zoom, they can watch you make changes to the document in real-time and let you know immediately whether it works or not. Some changes are going to take a little longer to make and because you do not want to hold the proceedings up by playing around with the content right then and there, you make note of them and fix it when you have an opportunity. The drawback to Zoom is that while you can use it on a mobile device, it is not always conducive to business when you are on the go as Liston normally is. A lot of factors at play in our meetings, it is a matter of finding the solution that best fits those factors.