New Digs....kinda

In early August, the Admissions staff had our final staff retreat of the summer where we finalized assigning office duties and travel/reading territories (among other things). As a special treat for the conclusion of our retreat, Thyra arranged for our staff to get a special hard-hat visit to our new digs. 

 For those who don’t know next summer Harvey Mudd College will be unveiling its brand new Teaching and Learning Building. The 70,000 square-foot academic building will “provide flexible and technologically-advanced classrooms, lecture halls, faculty offices and public spaces to support the pedagogies and learning styles – for today and tomorrow.”

 But what’s most exciting for my colleagues is that the TLB (I don’t know if that’s what we’re supposed to call it, but I’m going with it) will house our new digs!!!! The most exciting part for me, of course, is that the TLB will house a brand new café which will make it much easier to get my morning coffee fix.

It was fun to walk through all of the different sections of the building, and though there aren’t many walls up yet, it was much easier to visualize the space that will be the Office of Admission by this time next year. Raissa and I were able to “duke-it-out” over who will claim which office space and at this point I think we’ve pretty much come to an agreement. However, I suspect divvying up office space will be a subject revisited at least once more before we make the big move across the courtyard :)

Special Thanks to Asst VP for Planning and Construction David Dower for our guided tour of the TLB! 

Heeeellllooo World!!!!

Well, as I’m sure many of you know, our beloved Colleen Smith has left Harvey Mudd College in pursuit of other opportunities and though we wish her well, we will also miss her greatly. She was one of our two resident office bakers (the other is Thyra), she provided comforting snacks and tea for long committee days, and of course she oversaw management of the admissions blog (among other things).

Colleen's Going Away Carrot Cake baked by Thyra

In case you were wondering, we did send Colleen off with a semi-bang. For her last day, Thyra baked a magnificently moist Carrot Cake complete with a decorative frosting pattern and I hope Thyra knows that for future celebrations we will all be expecting similar effort put into our cakes :)

I say we celebrated with “semi-bang” because Peter, Raissa, and Falone were all of out of the office for much-needed vacations on Tuesday and were unable to celebrate with us. Therefore, we have promised Colleen a BIG BANG celebration later in August!

Aileen, Gilma and Colleen on her last day!

As Colleen mentioned in her final blog, another change for our office this year is that we will soon be unveiling a new, exciting, completely overhauled Office of Admission website! As part of this new website, the entire admissions staff will take a much more active role in blogging so that you get to hear from and learn about all of us! In the meantime, I will be attempting to live up to Colleen’s blogging legacy by keeping you all updated on the happenings of the HMC Office of Admission.

For anyone who might not know me, my name is Jamilla and I’ve been working in the Office of Admission for just over a year now. I won’t go into all the boring details about myself, but if you’re interested in learning more about me, Colleen did a great intro blog all about yours truly last summer so feel free to check it out!

As the summer comes to a close, we are all wrapping up summer vacations and preparing to begin a new academic year. Next week, we’ll have our final Staff Retreat of the summer (as you’ll recall, Colleen posted about our previous Staff Retreat in June) during which we’ll finalize our plans for the coming year. Yes, we have so much to talk about we actually have two separate 2-day staff retreats…yikes! After that, we’ll all be planning and heading off on our Fall Travel and before you know it, applications will begin streaming in!

We’re all very excited for the new year coming up and particularly getting to know all of our blog followers a little better!