I was at a fair in Providence, RI last night, and one of the people who came to my table came up to ask about being an admissions representative. Our Administration of Higher Ed program has field work as part of the requirements, and every once in a while we have people doing their field work in our office - learning a little bit about how admissions work goes. Admissions work is highly cyclical; what you're doing on a given day is dictated by the week and month of the year, and right now it's Travel Season.
Jack Kerouac has nothing on me at the moment. It's only the third week in September, and I feel like I'm living off of yogurt and coffee and out of a series of duffel bags, suitcases, and tote bags.
I joke (especially on Twitter) about the glamourous life of the admissions representative. For the most part, being out recruiting is a lot of fun (no matter how much I poke at it). You meet a lot of really great people. Students are overwhelmingly pleasant. Fellow recruiters are friendly folks (it's a group of people who more or less self-select to do the direct-sales job of going out to talk to prospective students - unfriendly recruiters are not recruiters for very long). It's a chance to get out of your comfort zone and explore somewhere new, and for those instances that involve a good bit of travel, it's an opportunity to do things you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to. (For instance, I'm looking forward to a circus class at a place in Salt Lake City next week.)
There are downsides, of course. My dog is having anxiety over feeling abandoned. I have a pile of laundry that needs to get done and no time to do it. As far as family and friends are concerned, I drop off the face of the earth for 6-8 weeks. The pile of papers on my desk gets large, and my inbox larger as I work remotely. Since I work closely with other aspects of administration at the university (like the registrar, institutional reporting, bursar, financial aid, the web group), there's meetings and planning and other things that I have to try to work into a schedule in which my time in the office is both limited and precious.
In other words, it's a job. It happens. And then it's November and there's a totally different set of things to do and people to see and problems to tackle and opportunities to embrace. Speaking of which, I need to go tackle and embrace some of the September problems/opportunities.
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