My first week of summer work has ended, and I'm extremely excited. Being able to help welcome so many new students to Swelles feels really rewarding, especially since my own first-year transition was anything but smooth. I want to emphasize the inevitability of flaws, and to help the newbies see that the perfectionist culture that tends to exist here isn't necessarily healthy or realistic.
One of the warnings I received when I accepted this position, though, was that people would be paying a lot of attention to us. Because my co-coordinator and I are in charge of helping plan orientation from a student perspective, we're supposed to be the faces of the program, in all its favors and flaws. Which means that people will be scrutinizing us. Closely.
I didn't really realize that fully until yesterday, when some anonymous soul posted unfair (and untrue) criticisms of me and my co-coordinator online. The comments were quickly deleted by their author, and now I find them funny more than anything, but I was a little taken aback when I first read them. People seem to feel most comfortable putting other people into neat little boxes and categories as they see fit, oftentimes without considering that an assumption that they make about someone might not necessarily be true.
This is all getting very vague and obtuse, and I promise that one day I'll sit down and write an organized and meaningful post, but I felt a need to be a little indignant for five minutes. This summer has really been fantastic so far, and I'm content and eager to see how it develops. It'll be a wild ride, and I'm ready to see exactly what that entails.
If you've made it this far, thank you!
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