Youth works in a web support team. "So a lot of my work has just been kind of adopting his (mentor's) process in various ways and changing mine to kind of reflect his way of doing things which has worked pretty well."

"She had a couple questions on why something was a certain way (regarding a computer problem) and I didn't have a quick answer for her. So we both had to struggle through and figure out why something wasn't working the way it was supposed to work. But she ended up figuring it out on her own. I walked away and said, 'OK, we'll just figure it out.' And a couple of minutes later she said it was this. She had this other button pressed and I said, 'Oh.' So she had figured it out. When she was starting to get some trouble she'd ask."

"(My intern) had a story on religious prejudice and racial prejudice within high schools. (Over) two months she had to do it over and over and over again. She had to check her facts and her sources. She would turn the story in with two or three sources and I would say, 'What about this angle, and what about this angle?' It took her two months to get the story done. And it was this fabulous story. It was wonderful.

"But we did have to go over being thorough and making sure you get every part of the story - talking to counselors, talking to advisors, talking to seminary teachers, talking to kids who are Caucasian, those who are Black, those who are Asian. We wanted to get the whole perspective, so she worked on it a long time. And every time she'd come back we'd give her two or three more people she needed to check with. But it turned out great. It turned out very nice. It's interesting that the story came out so well in the end even though it took so much help. That's why it came out so well. Because it did take so much help. That's the way it works here.

"The more you ask and the more people in the newsroom you ask, the more perspectives you get, the better you're going to be. If you can 'beat' a story, go over a story ten or twelve times, it's going to be great by the time it's finished. The problem is, with the newsroom, with regular news, we have one week to get a story done. And we have eight other stories due that same week. So you can't devote the time you need to it. When you can devote the time you need to it, and you have several people go over it and send it back and back and back, you get your award winning stories. That's when you get your best ones out.

"She's the one who had come to me and said, 'Is this the way it needs to be-Is it okay now?' And I'd say, 'Let me check'. And so she'd sit over my shoulder and we would go over the story together and I'd be like, 'Have you tried to contact so and so?' And she's like, 'Oh, no I forgot. Okay, I'll bring it back to you next week.' She was more than willing to put in the extra because she knew it was a good story. And she wanted it to be the best she could. So she kept going over it."

"I try to open up my thought process and share out loud what I'm thinking and how I'm making decisions. That's where the teaching and the creativity is, by example, by sharing my creative process, by verbalizing: 'I have this conundrum here. I have this problem. I'm weighing up the factors. I'm looking at this, if I do this it means I'll not have this done but if I do this that may take precedence.' Once I verbalize that and made my decision, I stay to work on it."

The same mentor describes how he verbalizes through a "creative block. I get up and say, 'I've got a block.' I verbalize that I'm looking through books for something that inspires me and isn't it amazing that it was all here just in my surrounding. I just had to stop thinking in terms of a fixed product and give myself over to the creative process of research.... They start to see that I'm just a person of creative blocks just like they are. They see how I trick myself into breaking through and creating things."

"In the lighting area, all the guys ended up getting pulled into this. We had some major problems, things that we couldn't understand and we did tons of trouble shooting, and calling up and getting advice from some professionals and getting them down here. And what's fun about these types of instances, that we're all standing around scratching our heads together. And eventually we get it solved. And then we make sure that everyone understands and we can point to the electrical components on this particular project, 'See this, this here is what's bad and that's why we replaced it.' And, 'Isn't that cool? Oh, man, I don't know what we're going to do this summer.' And we start belly aching about the future. 'And now that we've cannibalized the other units this one is all that works.'

"It was a lot of fun to go through all the trouble shooting. They'll always come to me and say, 'Well, we've tried that, now what are we doing?' 'Well, try this,' and I'll give them another idea. Then they usually go and try it and come back and that didn't work and then I'll go down and scratch my head with them until we (solve it). Literally it was probably a twenty day project."

"We have a child who has definite behavior problems.... (The child) had about four episodes since school has started, and I think they were just a little tired of dealing with (the child). Along the same line, they didn't know how to deal with (the child). So, they were very quick to say, '(The child's) not listening. (The child's) misbehaving.' They weren't even giving (the child) a chance. And I think (the child) was being treated very unequally because of previous behavior.

"It seems that everybody took a different view when I said, 'Instead of just punishing (the child) or time out, or getting so frustrated, we are going to post a behavior plan for this child. We will include (the child) in the activities just as we do every other child.' It seems like that's going to work. Everybody was very responsive to that. Including both interns. They said right away, 'Well if we have something to go on, or if we knew....' I think when (the child) acted up they didn't know how to respond to (the child). So immediately when they said, 'You're not going to be allowed to play the game. You're going to have to sit down and cool off for a while,' they got excited, which only made (the child's) behavior worse. As we talked they said, 'This will be great. We'll put up a poster.'

"They were very responsive to it and it seems like this is what they really wanted. When I spoke to his mom and reported to them that the child's mom was in total agreement to help us in any way she could, I think they were just surprised and more than willing to work with the child. And I realized that they had just never given thought to finding ways to work around it or asking someone else for help.

"I think it was a real learning experience that they realized they're not alone. And that we don't just have to deal with everything all by ourselves. There are resources out there to help us. So I think when they learned that, it made them very responsive to working with this child. And no one has said another word about, 'I don't think he should be in the child care program with the rest of the kids.' Somebody even brought this up,'Well, what if it doesn't work?' I said, 'Well, then we go to step two and I don't know what that's going to be yet.'" Two and a half months later, the mentor reported: "When we had the same problem (with another youth) (one intern) said, 'I'd like to write a note to (the child's) parent. I'd like to talk to the parent and see if they have any ideas how to better keep control.' She didn't say 'I don't think that child should be here.'"

"One of the things I had (my intern) do last year was a wiring harness for an engine in this little boat that they have been working on. I just drew by hand a diagram... and said, 'Here you go, wire up this, this engine panel,' from the little picture that I drew him. He really likes that sort of mechanical... work, and if you give him something like that to do... he'll finish it, and he won't be wandering off. I've certainly learned through these experiences, once I get to know who a person is, you find out what it takes to keep his attention.

"It's not always possible (to assign projects), but I love to be able... to give him something that would would keep him going like that. Something that he's interested in... and that he can do.... And it's all his. And then when it works later it's a... nice feeling.... I try not to do anybody's thinking for them. I'll let them flounder for awhile before I bail them out, if that's what it's going to take. It's the nature of this kind of work. There's a lot of problem solving.

Mentor explains that he teaches more than how to do a task by giving problem-solving situations to youth: "'I'm not going to tell you how to do it, because that's not how you're going to learn. This is what we have, I want you to go over and try to figure out and then come and tell me what you've found. And then I'm either going to tell you're right or we're going to go over it at that row.'

"I don't like to just go, 'This is what's wrong.' If it's something I think he might be able to figure out, I want him to try to apply himself to try to figure out. Because if I tell him how to fix everything, it isn't going to do him any good.... I'm giving him situations where I think he might be able to do it. Even if he can't, he applies himself."

Youth and mentor would work on a mechanical problem that takes more than 5 minutes and consult books in the process: "I thought he was pretty good in that part. He helped me a lot. He actually could read some of these. I'd read them, and we're following in our books, and go to do it, and he said, 'I think you're reading that wrong.' We'd re-read it and I'd go: 'Oh, I think you're right.' So he actually helped me at times."

An intern describes how she gained self-confidence. "The comfort zone is like when you're staying in one spot and you're scared to go and reach out for anything farther because of fear of some kind. And I've learned to step out of my fear zone because I have interacted far beyond people in my work place. I've talked with people on the phone. I've talked with them doing their taxes. And it's really gotten me comfortable."

"This last thing we had him do, I told him what the goal was, what I needed out of it, and we went over generally how to go about it. He was able to get into several different spread sheets and combine them to come up with the information that we needed. I was really impressed that he would know how to do that; how to combine the different spread sheets and sort them and come up with the proper new spread sheet that we were looking for. You know he can think by himself pretty well like that. He pretty much did that by himself, We sat down and told him where the information was, what we were looking for, and turned him loose and told him if he had any questions to come back to us, not be afraid to ask any. He was able to do it on his own pretty much.

"We had to make a few suggestions on the looks of the thing, when we were done, but by and large, he came up with the majority of the finished product. He would come up a few times a day with questions. We were working on him not to be shy about asking questions on these things. And I was real pleased he could do that. How did you work with him on that - feeling comfortable to ask questions? Just to tell him that we would much rather he ask questions than to sit and try to think things out by himself. I mean we wanted him to think things out by himself, but if he just really wasn't sure what to do on something, to come talk to us.... If we see he has a problem, we try to work with him and try to make him think that his problem is important too."

"When we built the (the exhibit for) the flower show, I've never built one of these before either, and the kid knew that up front. We're both flying blind here. 'Now how are we going to find out? Well, let's run some experiments.' And so we had ponds around the zoo with flamingos and stuff like that and we'd go out with a board and push water around, and you fiddle around and you use the stop watch and say, 'Oh, that worked. The flamingos didn't like it, but it worked....'

"But part of the clue of how this works is that I've got my bag of tricks. Now I know some general things about physics and science and inertia, but I don't know exactly, because no one's ever built one just like this before. You can't go get it out of a book somewhere. Now what do you do? And so we stumbled around together and I let us make mistakes and we fixed the mistakes and then tried that and that didn't work either or it did work. 'Oh, well, I guess, OK, let's go to plan C.' And so the kid learned that doing math and science is being flexible."

A mentor who is a pole staker, delegates a staking project to his intern. "We had to build a three phase line instead of a single phase, just upgrading it to provide for the further development of this community. And (my intern) was right there with me during this project, which is a very large intensive project. And we staked it together. We designed it together. And when we got back (from the field), a lot of times he will even draw up these jobs for us. That's a huge, huge task, and a big responsibility.

"He is not afraid to ask questions. He wants to learn; and many times where he would want to know why we would use a particular structure pole. There are different structures depending on the weight of the line, the distance of the line coming to it, the angle of the pole. And he would want to know, 'Why didn't we put this here, why don't we put that there,' and you would sit there and you would explain."

Mentor involves youth in conducting a patient survey. "We wanted to look at if the patient is getting enough information in the unit, if they're getting their pain medication on time, and if there is anything in their stay here that we can improve. 'How are you going to approach the patient. How you're going to introduce yourself to a patient, and how are you going to ask the question?' I went over with her some follow up questions, we role played and she did very well.

"This girl is bright and she even suggested some follow-up questions. For example, if the patient says that 'I did not get pain medication on time,' ask the question, 'What is your expectation when you ask for pain medication?' I gave her credit, 'Oh that's a very good idea. I didn't even think about it.' Putting it into words like 'What is the time frame' instead of asking the big question, 'What is your expectation or How many minutes may be quicker.' If you explain to them the big picture then they can ad lib. She doesn't have to repeat the question that I framed for her to ask the patient, because they have to adjust to the situation, to patients, and to their educational background. But if they know the big picture and what I'm really trying to get from patients, then they can ad lib."

A mentor advises youth on entrepreneurship. "We'd talk about his customer base and some potential additional services he can offer. I've run across somebody that's looking for a service that needs to be done. I think it will fit with his business plan. I wanted to be able to introduce him to that and then have him go talk to this fellow. Actually it did end up being a pretty good summer project for him to do.

"Hopefully we give him some additional encouragement and also give him a variety of ways of looking at what he is as a business. He started out saying he was a delivery business. Well, he is, but he's also a service business. The different things that he can deliver and different products that he can do under what he's doing. It let him know a little bit of what the network was out there, whom he should visit.

"Just by basically giving him some names, talk back and forth some possibilities, give him some ideas and see if he'll run with it a little bit.... It may not have come out as what he wanted, but at least it was a good learning experience for him on how to ask questions. I was able to go a little bit behind the scenes and forewarn some people that he was coming so that they'd be open to talking to him. And it's also seizing the opportunity. Not one person has all the answers. There are a variety of different approaches to a problem."

In prepping for a lawsuit, a mentor asks his intern to play the defense attorney and poke holes in his arguments. Then he switches roles to counter-attack these points from the other side. These exercises allow the mentor to "see (youth's) analytical process" and "what he is focusing on as... the crux of the issue."

"We went to the nature trail and checked the bird feeders to see if they needed seed. I just pointed out to her some of our projects that we've done on the trail and she expressed interest. She wants to participate outside of the school program to help do some projects with building nest boxes. She's a girl scout. She needs a project for her community service and she asked me what I thought about her helping us do a project on the nature trail. I told her that I thought that would be great.

"She had to submit something to her scout leader to see if that project would be appropriate. Last Friday I gave her all the information she needed and she told me that whenever she came back this week that she was going to let me know if she got permission to proceed with that. It's like an extracurricular project outside of what we're doing here but I thought that that was really neat that she expressed that interest. She even asked if it would be ok if she brought some of her classmates or some of the other girl scouts that are in her troop. She wanted to bring them to the nature trail.

"I guess she and a couple of her friends are thinking about building a nature trial so she was wondering if I would give her friends a tour of the trail and help them get started with it and I told her no problem. So I'm real excited because that's another avenue of outreach and education for the Audubon project that we're in. I think it's neat. I feel that we've already affected this individual. She's really excited about it and actually starting today. They're here. She's here Tuesdays through Fridays. She is working on a special project - a native revegetation project for this new golf course. We're trying to get it certified in the Audubon as well. They're going to be doing some native plantings and some clean up in some native areas. She'll be spending the week with (another mentor) over there."

An intern reported: "I worked in human resources with insurance and benefits and stuff like. But the other three weeks I was assigned a weird kind of project I wasn't expecting. I was assigned a bookcase. Like this book case was all torn apart and the books were everywhere. I categorized the books. I made like pink slips that say 'Hey, return your book' or whatever.

"It was just a place where employees could check out books. I set it all up and just how to keep everything good with sending people late fees and stuff like that. It's just how you run a hotel. You keep tight, strict orders on it and don't let anything slip away. Or else you'll lose money. Just like losing books. At the beginning I didn't know how to approach the bookcase. I really didn't know what to do and my mentor came in and some human resources staff. We all really put the bookcase together and it was just a real teamwork effort. I mean it sounds kind of weird, a book case, you know, but it was supposed to portray how different kind of people have to work together to actually run a hotel.

"One person would be looking through the books to make sure there weren't any damages. One person would be refinishing the wood and making it look good. Another person would be categorizing. One person would be putting stickers. And it was just a team work effort and they tell me that it's a lot of teamwork to run a hotel. There were a few people in here always helping me and kind of teaching me. So I knew the value of teamwork and how much I needed it because there was no way I was going to finish that bookcase in three weeks without their help. Because it was really big. It was as big as that 25 foot wall. Not like a little bookcase thing.

"I kind of understood that they had to do something with teamwork because I wouldn't be in here just doing a bookcase. There's always something behind what (my mentor's) saying than what she's really saying. So I knew there had to be some trick to it. I just didn't know exactly what it was. She discussed the teamwork at the beginning and how of course it wouldn't take just me to build the bookcase. She said that teamwork is vital in basically anything you do. At the end she finished it up with how the hotel needed teamwork and how the bookcase represented it. We would talk about how we were going to (organize and label the books), and we decided as a team to categorize them alphabetically by author because the employees knew the famous authors rather than what the books were called. The way the books were titled wasn't based on what they were really about."

"We're actually going to visit a hospitality (center).... (My intern) is going to actually help me set up my display booth and do some recruiting. Number one, he is so excited that we're all going, but it's an opportunity. He's actually been listening to me when I do interviews in the office. I asked him if he would be interested in something like this. He said 'Well, I'm not really a people person.' I said 'Sure you are. You just don't realize it.'

"So he's like 'Do you think I could do that?' And I said, 'Well, let's try.' When we go (on this recruiting trip), it's a different situation because we're not actually doing interviews. We're just standing there, talking about (our company) and trying to get people interested. I said, 'How comfortable do you feel about talking to people?' He says, 'I don't have a problem talking to people. I just don't know if I can ask them all the questions that you do.' And I said 'Sure you can.' And so we're going to try it. 'It's about details and what you can tell people about (our company), what we have to offer, our opportunities.' And he's just learned more and more information about our company.

"I'm hoping he'll relay to our applicants more about benefits and what we have to offer as far as opportunities and growth. Once we go out there, he will have a job listing. I'm hoping that he'll be able to relay information about some of the positions because he's done a rotation. He could tell people, 'Well, this is an area that I've been in, and this is what I've seen. And this is what these positions have to offer.'"

The mentor explains how she changed her teaching behaviors toward her interns: "And I realized a year ago that some of (my interns) come back, and after three years any time there's the smallest problem they come to my office and say, 'Here it is. Here, this is what you need to handle.' And they'll leave me a child and a story, and I realized that I'm there to help handle the problems, yes! That's exactly what I was doing. I was handling them! And I thought to myself, my goodness, that was my fault. I wasn't taking the time to work with them. I was just taking the problem out of their hands and sending them back to work.

"And this year, especially (this intern) will be a star in child care. She's bright, her heart is in everything she does, and when I saw this immediately I said I would love to keep her for years. I want her to do well, and she wants to do well. I think if I didn't give her the opportunity to get involved in handling things and even the fun stuff, the planning, number one, she'd probably leave us. Or the end result would be, and I've seen this happen before, somebody I thought was good it turns out that every time I go to one of the child care rooms, I have a person leaning on the wall literally watching children instead of being part of it. And I did not want that to happen with (this intern).

"So, this year it's been a whole new approach. In fact, twice a week they work every day from three until six. Our center closes at six. Twice a week they're on the time sheet till six-thirty. They don't go home till six-thirty because we kind of go through the fun stuff, 'What are you going to do? What supplies do you need? Paint brushes, whatever. Where are you having trouble? Where do you need more help?' And that has worked out real well. I think it makes them feel very important that they're not just the high school kids who come in and help out. I know they feel they are part of our staff."