Blood, Sweat & Crumbs
Like bears, admission officers hibernate during the winter. We retreat from the world for a couple of months but, unlike our ursine friends, we don't snooze away the cold and snow. You keep us occupied.
From our respective caves (figuratively speaking, of course) around Greater Boston we read and read and read some more. It’s a solitary and labor intensive task as we open each file and meet the paper version of each of you. Like a good book, we lose track of time as we flip through the pages, and 9-to-5 work habits evaporate. Tuesday morning? Thursday night? Sunday afternoon? Keep reading.
If you saw the reading season version of each of us you might not recognize the admission officer who gave your info session or visited your high school. We certainly don’t look as spiffy as we do on the “Meet the Admission Officers” web page, that’s for sure. Think about it: if you don’t plan to leave your house for several days, bed head is not an issue, right?
We're a motley crew at this time of year. Usually dapper guys look rumpled; many don't shave. Sweats replace power suits and heels yield to slippers. Meals are often consumed on the fly, often at the keyboard as our desk doubles as a dining room table. (Maybe the desk at home is the dining room table.)
And apparently we're a messy bunch as we burrow into the piles of files. In fact, our app processing coordinator says we’re rather sloppy. Kathleen, the aforementioned app processing coordinator, is the czarina of the file room: she’s the (usually benevolent) taskmaster who manages the flow of credentials and files as 16,380 applications come and go from Bendetson Hall, twice each. And she's laughing about the unexpected detritus she's found between the covers of our color-coded manila files. (Let me quickly reassure you that we respect the integrity of each file, and each exists in a pristine electronic medium, but the actual folder is, apparently, an occasional catch-all for items besides your mid-year grades and an alumni interview report.)
In the last week or so, Kathleen has extracted a piece of chalk, an unpaid phone bill, an unpaid parking ticket, feathers (from a boa?) and strands of human hair (maybe one of us was scratching our head as we puzzled through an essay?) from various files. Like an archaeologist in the field (or your mother yelling at you to clean up your room), she announced this week (via a staff-wide email) that she's found grains of rice (takeout for dinner?), muffin crumbs (breakfast), coffee stains (self-explanatory), two chocolate chips (the last remnants of a late night snack?) and a pistachio shell (a protein pick-me-up?) hiding between the pages of an application. One folder had a blue stain on it (someone spilled laundry detergent) and one was slightly chewed. (Guilty: my puppy was the culprit on that one.)
"I don't need any more DNA in these folders," Kathleen's partner in crime harrumphed the other day after she spotted blood stains on one file. I told her it was likely the aftermath of a nasty manila paper cut. "I really don't like it," she said without a smile. (Trust me, the manila paper cut wasn't a happy moment, either.)
And we’ve all promised Kathleen that we will be neater. (She wields too much power, I think.)