To: greenspirit who wrote (119351 ) 12/24/2000 6:48:07 PM From: ManyMoose Respond to In the organization I work for, Affirmative Action has been a somewhat successful, if painful, exercise. An unintended consequence: Many of our offices are like outposts, remote from any large or even medium size city, and the local populace can be demographically skewed towards what the policy calls the majority. A person successfully recruited under affirmative action still has many hurdles to overcome. He or she just may not be happy or comfortable in a strange environment. It's possible for an agency to try too hard to meet its Affirmative Action goals. I encountered one such example when I was asked to mentor a young woman from the University of Tennessee. She was on her third summer of unhappy experience and was in danger of quitting, not just quitting, but utterly failing. The agency wanted her to succeed, for its own possibly selfish reasons. When she came to me I treated her like I did others I hired, with respect. I told her there was no free lunch. I told her she would succeed, but success might not be what she or the agency thought it would be. She went out and got her knees dirty with the troops, and spent a good summer doing work that she would be encountering after graduation. She bought herself an old bicycle and got around our remote little town with it. The store owners treated her with respect because I had introduced her to them, like I did the others I hired. She made plans to come back the next summer, and left feeling good about her summer. The next spring, I got word that she had decided to take a job in a papermill laboratory. She didn't really want to be a forester at all, she wanted to be a chemist. No amount of Affirmative Action was going to make her successful in the agency I worked for, but she was indeed successful.
