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Working Saturdays

My university expects faculty to work two Saturdays each academic year. In the Fall we have Family Weekend to try to help family members have a sense of what students do. The faculty side of the programming is for us to be available to meet faculty members during a fixed window. It is usually a pretty cheerful event, although afterward I have always felt the long week and crashed a bit.

In the Spring we interview scholarship candidates. The incentive is to help find the students who will be most successful here which is a win-win for everybody, but again it makes for a long week and I crash afterward.

I was very nervous with my admission interviews so I go into it knowing that it is a stressful time for the students I meet and that they will not always be at their best. I enjoy engaging them in conversation and encouraging them to display the quality of their thinking processes; the worst-case scenario is when out of nerves a student just clams up, because then there's nothing to go on.

The interviewing process is something I've done for my university in many other contexts. In my younger years I would interview job candidates at employment registries at conferences, sometimes seeing forty in two days. Now I am Faculty Ombudsperson and my intake when working with a faculty member in trouble is to get them to open up about their issue.

I am a shy person by nature but over the decades I have become comfortable with the mask I wear in such circumstances, drawing strength from the role I play.

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