Alas today was the final day of the three day long Josef Korbel School Orientation. When I got the orientation schedule via snail mail in August I was pretty dubious as to how they were going to be able to fill almost three full days, but somehow they’ve done it. I’m not one for so many words so I’ve created a numbered list of the top 5 “highlights” and the top 5 “downers.” Enjoy!
Highlights:
- Susan Rivera Half superwoman, half magician, all awesome. Susan is one fabulous lady you want on your rolodex, that is if you still have one. The first day conversations were all abuzz with “Susan helped me with this” and “Susan fixed that for me.” Rivera seems to make the world go round (well, at least at Korbel).
- Career and Professional Development Workshop The last day of orientation this long but informational workshop really set the tone in terms of getting serious about internships and jobs. In truth, it was quite frightening. I’m looking forward to camping outside of this office until I have a resume that could give President Obama a run for his money.
- MA Student Panel 2nd year returning MA’s gave their opinions on the best professors and classes, how to get highly competitive internships and the top watering holes around campus.
- The Food Muffins, cookies, and bagels…OH MY! If you’re like me food is always and I mean always my first priority. Korbel never let me down. From pizza lunches to coffee, juice and danishes for breakfast, my appetite was not once neglected. There was even a wine and cheese reception and I must say that the wine pourings were quite generous.
- Peace Corps Meeting I choose to attend the Josef Korbel School primarily because of the Peace Corps Masters International program. I am delighted to report that there is a large group of RPCV and MI students at Korbel and I’m looking forward to getting to know all of them.
Downers:
- Financial Aid Overview I prefer to remain oblivious to the face that I am borrowing over 50k this year. No wonder they gave us free wine.
- Certificate Information Sessions I went to the Humanitarian Assistance session. The session itself was not a downer but the fact that there are only a few spots is. Only about 10 spots will be opening this year and only a fraction of those will go to incoming students and I should mention that there were over 40 people at the info session. Not.good.odds.
- Campus Tours Penrose Library will be closed for about a year. This is not that big of deal for me since I never study in a library (I find silence distracting), but for the big library nerds out there this is a huge downer.
- Time Management On the first day we had a very, very long lunch break. I sat around a while before Chipolte finally opened.
- Scheduling Errors There was a discrepancy on some of the schedules for the starting time on Thursday. My schedule said 8 a.m. and it was actually 9 a.m. No biggie though, I got first dibs on the bagels.
