After being an excellent house manager for the Alpha Pi chapter of Kappa Sigma here on campus, I had established a good relationship with Mike Lynn. Mike is a residence life specialist for Wabash College, so his job relates to anything housing related with both fraternities and independent student housing. Towards the end of the semester, Mike had suggested to take a gander at the Dean of Students Office internship if I was looking for a job. I figured it couldn’t be that bad and decided to apply. I imagined it would be an office job. I had never had an office job and was ready to raise my cubicle skills. To my surprise, it was the opposite of that. I spent maybe a collective 2 hours in the office. The rest of the time was used in every housing unit. We began by clearing out all of the non-college furniture in order to make the next step easier. The next step was to set up the living units for various summer camps; such as football camp, CIBE interns, etc. Once everything was in its place, we could inventory our college furniture so that we could order anything we might need for the next schoolyear—like desks or armoires.
Although the job seems straightforward, we had a small team. Small, but mighty. I learned how to work with others’ strengths and weaknesses, adapt to complete the task at hand, and used some critical thinking to plan out the order of movement for the day. One thing I am especially thankful for is the ability to take some time off to do my annual training with the Army National Guard. I told the team ahead of time so we could get some harder stuff out of the way so that they weren’t down one person for some hard tasks. The hardest part of the internship was probably the heat. Man, it got toasty some of the days! Thank goodness Mike was an excellent boss and got us some drinks to stay cool and energized during the work day.
