March 05, 2005

Visiting Days

There's not been a lot of blogging round these parts recently, in large part because we're right at the peak of activity for our graduate admissions cycle.

As part of that cycle, each year, we bring in several of our top applicants for a two-day event that we call Visiting Days. The program pays to fly them in, current graduate students volunteer to host the visitors, and we either cater or pay for meals. It gives these applicants a chance to meet the faculty and students that we will potentially join, and it gives us more information about each of them as we make our final decisions about funding.

I can say this without sounding immodest, because it wasn't my idea to start with: I think that this is an exceptionally ethical practice, and one that I'm proud to be a part of. I had hoped for better weather this week (it snowed every single day, I think), but other than that, we gave our top candidates a chance to ask a lot of questions, to learn what they'd be getting into if they came here, and to meet the people with whom they would conceivably spend the next 4-5 years of their life. Visiting Days takes a lot of the guesswork out of coming here, and we're able to do it in a way such that the students themselves incur none of the costs. We book the flights, arrange the stays, and pay for the meals.

(By the way, this is a constant source of amazement to me, that universities ever ask students to bear the cost of recruiting trips, particularly when that student is applying for a job. I refuse to believe that universities with budgets in the millions of millions need to force graduate students to bear the costs of such trips. If I were in the position to do so, I would blacklist schools that continue to require graduate student applicants to purchase their own plane tickets, and then reimburse them after they've incurred interest. Unacceptable.)

So anyway, Visiting Days was Thursday and Friday, and by all accounts, it was a success. A nice combination of formal and informal conversations, and as much access in both directions as we could manage.

Next year, though, I'm going to try to get more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night during the week leading up to Visiting Days.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 08:09 PM | Comments (3)

January 22, 2005

1 week down, infinity to go

Yeah, yeah, I know.

But this is actually a brief post of semi-serious reflection. This is not the first time I've been called upon to do a little administration--in Virginia, I was the coordinator for the Professional Writing part of our MA program. This involved a little bit of curriculum design/revision, a little bit of scheduling, a little bit of advising, and, in my recollection at least, was largely informal.

But this is the first time where I've occupied a more formal position, one that carries its own office, and one where I actually rate assistance. M is not an "assistant" or "secretary" per se--her official title is Graduate Program Coordinator. I'm tempted to observe that M in fact does the "real work" while I strut around singing the praises of J. J. Abrams, Tony Shalhoub, and Junior Mints. It's not quite that bad, though--take a look at my schedule for next week if you don't believe me. Programs of all sizes and inclinations need both direction and coordination.

But see, one of the things that she coordinates is my calendar, which is both odd and tremendously liberating. It's odd, because I'm pretty self-sufficient as far as my professional life goes. I generally prefer to make my own copies, run my own errands--I don't like to make work for other people. And yet, there's a real luxury in allowing someone else to manage my calendar. In my first week, it's the biggest felt change in my life. I don't have to worry about setting up appointments, juggling demands, etc. They just talk to M, and I show up when I'm supposed to.

I could get used to that. I know that pretty much everyone from middle management on up in pretty much every industry already takes this for granted, and maybe someday I will too. But not for a while yet. Right now, I'm deeply appreciative, for something as silly as a printout of my weekly calendar that someone else has generated for me.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 12:22 AM | Comments (4)