Paul Randal Mentor Me?!

Paul Randal recently won the award for “Person You’d Most Like to be Mentored By” in the Tribal Awards, now Paul is offering to mentor 3 men and 3 women for two months. To get a chance of getting mentored by Paul, you simply need to apply by writing a blog post about why you should be considered for mentoring and posting the link by the February 15, 2015.  Wow, talk about an opportunity you can’t pass up in the SQL community.

First, a little about me.  I worked on SQL Server since 6.5 (yes a very long time) but I still have a lot to learn.  Outside of working I am a very slow runner (most would call it jogging) but hey I’ve completed a couple half marathons so I choose to call it running.  I have one son, who I adore, who is currently in college.  I love to read just about any book that is non-fiction, not much of an imagination for the fiction.

I have had the pleasure of attending the SQLskills Immersion events and have always come away with a lot information.  But mentoring would be different than attending a training event.  It would be an opportunity to get some career guidance and advice from an expert in the SQL community.

Things Paul could help me with include:

  1. Training.  So I’m one of those people that had a goal of becoming and MCM in 10 years but then the certification got discontinued.  Paul could provide me guidance on how to come up with a training plan similar to that level and maybe how to progressively change it as new versions and features come out for SQL Server.
  2. Blogging.  I started a blog a couple of years ago but haven’t done much with it.  Some of it is just me being gun shy on what to share, some is not knowing whether something is worth blogging about.  I would really like to get this part of my career goals of the ground and running with regular posts.  Just need a push in the right direction to make it happen and I believe Paul can help me with that.
  3. Time management.  I find it hard to have time to do everything I want to do and Paul seems to have be able to provide some tips on being productive with your time.  Paul is very active in the SQL community, teaches at classes, conferences, and user groups, reads millions (OK maybe not millions but a lot) of books, travels, has kids, and still manages to work consulting all over the world.  If I can do more with my time to position myself better with my career and in the SQL community I would like to.
  4. Presenting.  This something I have always wanted to start doing but never quite believe I had something worth presenting or knew where to begin plus I’m very introverted.  Getting guidance on types of things to present on and where to start with coming up with ideas would be great.  There is plenty of opportunities to present but just what to do then I need to just take the plunge.
  5. Career planning.  I’ve never much planned my career.  I started off has a system administrator, went to programmer, into a database administrator role.  Discover through all those that I liked databases the most particularly after I graduated from Access into SQL Server.  I recently started a new job after being at the same one for 10 years and need to plot out what is next at this company for me.

So Paul I hope you will pick me.

 

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