As the annual fall/winter college admissions season ramps up, Drew’s Admissions department is fully in gear, holding open houses and admitted students days galore in order to attract as many prospective Rangers as possible. As such, the university relies on its student orientation leaders, tour guides and other student Admissions staff to be the positive first impressions that future Drewids get of our campus.
However, many student staff are burning out. The Admissions events are not organized in a way that is sustainable for them – the last open house on Nov. 16 started at 5:45 a.m., and I physically could not fit in the Ehinger Center during the event. Campus was extremely overcrowded the entire time, and tour guides and directionals were continually dashing around helter-skelter in desperate attempts to alleviate the traffic as groups of prospective students bumped into each other on tours with increasing regularity.
Even on routine shifts, student staff very rarely are able to conduct their tours without navigating some kind of issue, whether it be families not showing up, a door being inaccessible for no reason (I’m looking at you, Brown Hall), someone on the tour making inappropriate remarks or the seemingly perpetual game of interdimensional chess that other students just trying to get to class must play on maximum difficulty in order to not hold up the entire path — among many others.
In addition to this, Admissions’ professional staff seem so massively overworked that they rarely, if ever, have time to actually help student workers navigate the many softwares and forms they must use. With the exception of the ever-gracious, all-knowing superpower known as Monica Ma, there is barely anyone that they can turn to when the archaic software that Drew still (for some reason) uses for school visits inevitably decides for the fourteenth time that week that an entire high school or even their student login account just doesn’t exist. Because of this, it often becomes a needlessly prolonged blind struggle to navigate otherwise mundane tasks like which folder to put where or what size shirt to pack into which tote bag.
During open houses and admitted student events, these issues are exponentially exacerbated. Student workers are expected to report to their shifts as early as 5:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning, long before the sun and the birds (or pretty much any other living being, for that matter) are remotely close to exiting their REM sleep. Directionals then stand in the often-freezing cold for hours at their post, guiding each family to their respective place, their frantic pleas for confused parents not to park their family minivans in the middle of Grad Path falling on perpetually deaf ears. Tour guides and Registration staff rush to fit every single one of the hundreds in attendance through while somehow simultaneously showing them every spot-on campus and making sure each one gets their correct tote bag and booklets.
It’s important to note that, all that being said, this is in no way, shape or form intended to imply that Admissions is fundamentally bad as a department, or at all that Admissions jobs are not all-in-all pretty fun, rewarding and engaging. They let students help out other teens in some of the exact positions they might’ve been in just a few years ago, making an all-too-often confusing and stressful college search and transition just that much easier.
And for the most part, despite some of the above obstacles, it’s a very tight-knit community. However, there definitely needs to be a change and update made to the organization of department functions — how can the university expect student workers to put on an energetic, happy front for potential new Rangers without ensuring that the staff actually has any energy left to do so?
How are people supposed to ensure that prospective students have a positive experience without being given the breathing room to manage their stress themselves?
Between the pressure of classes, finals, midterms, extracurriculars, internships, graduation requirements, credits and all the other myriad obstacles a student must overcome to obtain their hard-won Drew degree, the last thing those who turn to student work as a form of income need is additional chaos. Admissions staff voluntarily take on a huge responsibility and workload on top of their academic obligations — it should not be this hard for them to do their job.
