Closing Time

By the time this post is live, I will be done with recruitment.  I have a weekend of interviews in Houston, where I will talk to 28 high school seniors over two days and pray that I don’t ask one of them the same question twice.  I say this every year, but I seriously do not know where fall went.  As massive of an undertaking every recruitment season feels like, it always seems to disappear before you realize it.  My ’work travel’ email folder only has three confirmations left in it--which is good considering what happened last week in San Luis Obispo: I locked myself out of my hotel room immediately after checking in and, when the front desk attendant asked me which room I was in, I stared at her blankly and admitted I had no idea. You might think that after three years of recruiting in the same territory I would no longer get lost and would know exactly where the front office of every school is.  I wish this were true.  I often find myself in the mental dilemma of not knowing …

The High School Environment: Mistaken Identities, Student Restrooms, and Short Shorts (And Wondering Why They Are So Short)

Have you seen the movie Never Been Kissed?  An adult Drew Barrymore pretends to be a high school student for a newspaper article she’s writing, when a domino effect of awkwardness, hilarity and an inevitable love story ensues?  I feel like my reentry into the high school environment went along those lines--except the awkwardness is being mistaken for a high school student trying to sneak off campus, hilarity is me getting lost in a sea of linebackers during passing period (seriously, when did high school students get so BIG?) and the love is what I have developed for ample visitor parking and a student to walk me where I’m going. If I’ve learned anything from being back in the high school environment, it’s that very little has changed from when I was in high school.  If you change the clothing and take away the cell phones, you find kids are talking about the same things and working through the same obstacles you were back in the day.  I recall my first day of high school and not …

Using Evernote for High School Visits

If you’ve been using a smart phone for a while now, I'm sure that you have stumbled across, fumbled with, or heard about the thought management app known as Evernote. Those of you who use it daily know how fantastic it can be for remembering fleeting ideas, storing pictures, and clipping interesting web pages for further mental digestion. Those of you who don’t know what Evernote is can think of it as a digital trunk where you can put ANYTHING--notes, pictures, drawings, audio recordings, or web pages--to reference later so that you don't have to fill your personal ‘trunk’ (thus the elephant logo). What's so wonderful about Evernote is your ability to use it however you want; however, that’s also what makes it so daunting for users new to the platform. I could speak for pages about Evernote and how it can help any higher education professional, but what I hope to do with this section of the blog is intermittently break down how to use Evernote for various tasks related to our …