Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

admissions

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Man, blogger eats one witty post and i’m dead in the water for over a week. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t too witty… just something about Friends, urination, and Ghandi. I mean, honestly, whatever you just imagined the post to be was probably just as funny as the erstwhile real thing.


This weekend i worked an event called Scholars Days, which are the point in the admissions process when the middling-to-exceptionally smart applicants get dressed up in order to impress the faculty members who will contribute to deciding how big each scholarship will be. Exciting stuff. I remember when i came to campus for my interview i was completely miserable, soaking wet, and skeptical that i would even pass by Drexel’s campus on the street again let alone attend. So, i find working this event to be implicitly ironic.

In case you were wondering, student employees are all but invisible on Scholar’s Days. Students are either too miserable or too nervous to want to talk to us, and parents are either too overwhelmed or too well-trained as stage-mothers to listen to our incredibly valid opinions about the campus. As a result, i basically spent ten hours of my (well-paid) life alternately reading and crowd-watching.

My favorite iteration of the latter is definitely making up stories about all of the students i catch a glimpse of. This activity keeps me blithely entertained and also allows me the illusion of attentiveness. The Gimme Round tends to involve identifying the chronic pot smokers and the never-been-kissed crowd; not especially challenging. Next i move on to identifying those who have competed in science fairs, guessing at what their project was for bonus point. Afterwards, if it’s not a liberal arts day, i play “Trekkie or Comic Book Fan?” Even more tricky is trying to decide who is questioning their sexuality, closely followed by who is definitely not questioning their sexuality (though maybe they should be). And, finally, in what i like to think of as the lightening round, i contemplate who will join the theatre (we tend to be rather intelligent, on the whole) and, subsequently, who will spend their first cast party sucking face with one of the cast members of our current play How To Save The World (or The Play Big Business Doesn’t Want You To See).

If only i could get together a panel of my peers and a tiny buzzer i think Scholars Days would go by much faster. As it was i had to convince Aim to have a Corona and some wings with me afterwards to salvage the weekend at all.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/390367579/

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On an unbelievably brief break from putting together my monster 1100+ piece mailing for Admissions today i took a moment to read a few blogs. Now, you have to understand that this is something i haven’t done for a fairly long time … i’ve even fallen behind on my tacet upkeep with Rabi, Tom, and Martha to the point where Elise has to inform me that the former was on break and the latter was back from hers. It didn’t take too much reading to remember why i enjoy this so much, and i’ll spare you the highly irrelevant details, but i was shocked the entire time by how out of the loop i am. Sure, i’m out of the teevee loop, as i’ve pretty much given it up cold-turkey. And, yes, i am out of the national news loop — i found out about the Washington Sniper in Linguistics class when someone mentioned it in a report they were doing about the speech community at WPVI News. But, i feel as though i’m out of some larger, more all-encompassing loop … instead just repeatedly running the Peter-circuit without a care in the world.


Hoping to amend that soon, but right now i think i need to take a minute to actually eat something before starting on homework or some indefinite quest to reclaim my witty bloggness.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85578148/

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There are a certain number of Freshmen who come to the Admissions office on the first day of class every fall, each armed with a question. They don’t know who to go to about their bill. They can’t figure out where their Dean is located. They haven’t seen Curtis Hall anywhere on campus and have class there in two minutes. In short, they’re lost.

They are lost, and they think we’ll know where they should be and that we will tell them without making too much of a fuss about how woefully uninformed they are as they enter this very important stage of their life. They’re right, of course, as this is without a doubt the friendliest and best equipped office within the entire University with the possible exclusion of the counseling center. However, i don’t necessarily credit their arrival solely to such a basic assumption.

We sent them an application or a catalog, maybe as long as two years ago. They’ve talked on the phone to their counselor here, and maybe even made it in for a visit. When they got their triple-thick acceptance envelope in the mail, it was our return address that was emblazoned on all of the letterhead within. We brought them here, and given the choice of desk staff or resident assistants or their friends or anything else they routinely wander into our office with the first of the many difficulties they’ll be faced with.

I feel a little like that about this page. It has opened up my writing, my music, and my life to avenues that i hadn’t even previously contemplated. It has also eaten my time, caused balled up fists and angry words, and has drawn an indifferent sigh of resignation on more than one occasion.


I am past my first problems, those things we are asked once every fall here in the office. I used to come here with all of my difficulties: with my degree program, with theatre, with singing, with the opposite sex, and with myself. But, slowly, all of these problems have resolved themselves into much more complex honeycombs of issues – interconnected, maze-like, and sticky. And, for lack of anything so easy to complain about as a class i can’t get into or a girl that doesn’t seem to notice my existence, I seem to have given up on writing anything.

What a very few of the freshmen ever seem to realize is that they can come back to our office more than once. Diane will still know the answer to their questions. Maggie will still smile and fawn over them. The counselors will still fight for them the same way they fought to make sure they enrolled here to begin with. I was lucky enough to find this out more than a year after my first timid askance of the location of Curtis Hall, and whenever i really need an ear of someone who is impartial to my problem but willing to help me however they possibly can i still come here.


And here. So, welcome back.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/09/85483145/

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I didn’t go on too many college tours when i was looking at schools (possibly to my detriment), but of the ones i saw i was almost wholly unimpressed. Sure, the concept is good: pair a couple dozen visitors with one friendly student and let the campus speak for itself. In my experience, it never really works out that way; the worst case scenario typically involves the campus saying very little and the tour guide following suit, but being bored definitely isn’t the worst possible result of a tour.

The best tour i saw was at my first choice school, Boston University. Our tourguide was a petite sophomore wearing two inch thick chunky heels who walked backwards and just-short-of screamed at us for a two mile circuit of the campus. As tour guides go i consider her my role-model, and i try my best to do her proud. In fact, i did so twice today.


In case you haven’t picked it up from context, i’m not exactly ecstatic about my college; after four years the same old mistakes and scheduling problems are tiring, especially pared with the fact that i should’ve shopped around more extensively for colleges to start with. However, just because i’m wearying of my collegiate experience doesn’t mean that i should pass on anything other than enthusiasm to incoming students — not only for the sake of being a good salesperson, but because i owe it to them to give them the best possible idea of why they might want to come here.

Some days that best example includes climbing onto desks, singing acappella in the middle of our bookstore’s lobby, telling my group that i’ll be making up a name for the athletic field until i can remember what it’s actually called, and making used-car-salesman like guarantees about our housing policies. It’s unorthodox, to say the least, but people never fail to smile, laugh, ask questions, and shake my hand when i give a tour in my own special fashion. And, while i would never suggest hiring an entire staff of maniacs like myself, there is definitely something to be said for being able to frankly discuss a campus in a way that’s both endearing and amusing … as well as entirely unscripted.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/09/385456151/

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I’m not here to make friends.


Don’t get me wrong, i like friends! I have lots of friends, and a very small list of people i’m neutral towards, and a tiny tiny handful of people i have feelings of hostility for. I had lots of friends in Admissions, and over a year after i started working there (and over a month since i stopped) i still do. This job is a bit different, though. I can’t really describe it … i suppose it’s the sense that processes are still being formulated. Even though there are upwards of thirty thousand records in this building, there are some things that are still getting nailed down … what to do with double-entries on the database, what the most efficient method of shelving is, and so on and so forth. Being at that particular place in an organization makes a huge difference in the role you take in it … i had a very active role in Admissions, but i didn’t really change anything — other than the order that the fact sheets are stacked in the closet.


The point, since i haven’t done anything to make it obvious thus far, is that it’s sometimes hard to be friendly when you’re trying to make sure the most efficient process is being put into place so that everyone doesn’t wind up putting in hours of extra work in the long run. Some things that seem smart to me – like using a normal library alphabetization scheme for the records on the shelves – winds up being a massive waste of time because it causes confusion and questions. I had to get up the nerve to ask why we weren’t putting the records in the “correct” order before finding this out, though, and suggesting to someone that they can’t alphabetize isn’t really a very friendly thing to do.


I don’t know if i had a point, really. Just that it’s a wholly different balance than Admissions was, and, despite early estimations, i’m definitely learning something from it.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/85029997/