Dividing the Work

I had a mid-summer break in July, when I went on vacation for my Aunt’s wedding. After I got back, though the Office of Admission had a pretty full two weeks of visitors and projects. Through the busy time I noticed a few things about the relationship between the leaders of the office and us, the interns or followers.

As I believe I have mentioned, the interns in the office watch over the front facing part of Admission. We sit at the desks out in the front of the office and are the first faces that visitors will see during their time there. Therefore, we report to a lot of different people in the office. Our supervisor is the main person we work with overall, but day to day we encounter a lot of people in the office, who are responsible for a lot of different things.

For example, the supervisor of the tour guide program is seen pretty frequently since we work closely with the tour guides, even giving tours ourselves sometimes. This supervisor is the one that mainly deals with the tour guide program, but the scheduling is left to the lead intern for the summer. Interns have also been involved in various projects throughout the summer. Some have involved calling incoming students, finding emails, and ordering materials needed in the office. Even our Dean of Admission will come and request small tasks from us sometimes. Therefore, it seems that there is not one team in the office that mainly works with the interns. There are definitely some people that we do not hear from as much, but they are involved with less of the front facing work from my understanding.

So, overall I have noticed that some of tasks that the leaders have are delegated to the interns so that they might work on other things. At the same time, there are other tasks that they could do without us, but we are included because we do have the perspective of being students and can contribute that input to projects. Also, they want us to be involved in the behind the scenes work of admissions as well. The leaders seem to want to give us as valuable of an internship experience as possible. In another blog I wrote about how approachable the leadership in the office is, so the leaders are very understanding and helpful with the work they ask us to do.