Early birds

It felt über-virtuous to be sitting in a conference room all day today facilitating the training of this year's Seminar Fellows, the peer advisers who conduct our First Year Workshops. The new academic year doesn't begin until August 30th (itself oddly early - usually we don't start until the day after Labor Day)! Yet here we were, not just a week early - Orientation is next week, though only new students, staff and a few faculty are there for it - but almost a week before that. But there's not really any other reasonable time the training could take place; at least I've compressed what used to be a 4-5 day process into 2. It's overwhelming but in its way exciting, just far enough outside the academic year for the Seminar Fellows to get a sense of the university as a whole, and their privileged place as mentors and guides charged with showing new students how to navigate this strange new world.