Looking at Prospectives

I'm terrible at posting on time.

Anyway, I got up at 5:15 on Friday morning after going to bed at 11 in order to volunteer at UVa's Days on the Lawn program. These days offer prospective students and their parents opportunities to become familiar with Central Grounds, learn about various programs and financial aid, visit a class, and meet other people from the entering class and from UVa in general. I never had the opportunity to do this as a transfer student so I was glad I at least got to see what it was like before I graduated.

My first shift started at 7:30 and I was tasked with escorting students and their guests up from one of the parking garages up the massive hill to the Rotunda. Our job was to answer any questions and show them the way up to the Academical Village, and to not let them get discouraged from the march up the hill. I put on my happy and smiling face and answered and asked various questions the students or parents had. Apparently I was able to answer a lot of what they were wondering about and may have steered some people into coming up here for school next year.

At 8:15 I shifted to working the tables where students signed up to visit a class. Some of the students had preregistered and they were easy to take care of. Most, however, had not and it was sometimes difficult to find something that interested them and fit the schedule for their day. This shift really consisted of me running back and forth between various tables checking schedules, class openings, numerous alphabetically ordered lists of students, and really struggling to reconcile the sticker sheet of classes that had course names versus the alphabetical sheet of classes that had the course mnemonics. They were not often the same, or even closely related.

The class signup table had become overstaffed by 8:45 so I went to the registration table where people who were arriving signed in for the day and received a UVa bag, information folder, and guidebook. I was immediately given one of about 12 seats at the table and began crossing off students' names as they came up from the massive line that was forming in front of Old Cabell Hall. I signed in about 15 people by 9 a.m. when the information session began. After the session had started I signed in about another 30 people or so until we started breaking down tables around 9:30. I felt bad for the people who got there after 9 (mainly because of Charlottesville's heinous traffic situations) because they essentially missed the information session, but there were other, smaller ones throughout the day so I'm hoping they got to go to something.

I was then asked to move two tables, big tables, from the South Lawn up to the admissions building, not a short walk. I was given a tiny dolly and because of its size I could not put the tables on in any non-awkward way. I eventually laid them down so it looked like the dolly had wings and grabbed another volunteer to help guide me up the various pathways to the admissions building. UVa does not make it easy to transport wide loads around.

After multiple blockades had been overcome we made it up to the building and moved the tables inside. I then worked from about 10 to 10:45 signing in late people and again going through the terribly organized class lists. We also found out that one of the classes we had sent 7 people to had been canceled that Friday, a fact the professor was supposed to notify us about. Only three of the 7 came back and I worked personally with 2 of them to find them a different one. We decided on the History of the English Language, a class that one of my roommates had taken last year. I escorted them down to the classroom building and, after being briefly lost because of poorly numbered rooms, we found the correct one and I watched as they nervously took some seats towards the back of the class.

I then walked home in order to get the stuff for my class at 12. As I walked back up to Central Grounds to go to Polish I saw a lonely little prospective staring blankly at a map at the bottom of the stairs that are the furthest away from anywhere you want to be going around the grounds. I walked down to him and asked if he needed help. I told him how to get back to the Lawn, which is where he said he could find his way from and then I headed off to my class.

When I entered the room I didn't have any thoughts of "what would it be like if this were the first class I was going to at UVa" or anything like that. I was simply greeted with a few cześć's and some compliments on how my black eye was healing.