What a difference a day makes

I wasn’t at Fletcher yesterday. On Tuesday when I arrived, there was a steady hum of conversation in the Hall of Flags, and a line of students outside the registrar’s office waiting to pick up exams. This morning, there was one student in the Hall of Flags, and the coffee supply had been halved.

Graduating students are busy making final plans, packing, and attending “Dis-Orientation” activities. Dis-Orientation was started two years ago by students who believed they needed a week of full-class togetherness to balance the Orientation program they attended before their first semester. There are student-led picnics, museum visits, softball games, swing dancing, a brewery tour, movies, and an all-day luau. And parties. Lots of parties. Daily parties.

Students finishing their first year are heading off for internships. I’m looking at a partial list and I count seven United Nations internships (with the Secretariat and a variety of agencies), six interns at the State Department, several at NGOs (African Wildlife Foundation, Save the Children to name just two) and a bunch at private sector organizations (Yahoo!, ExxonMobil, BNP Paribas, and others). Sometimes they go to Dis-Orientation parties before leaving town.

Summer is generally pretty quiet at Fletcher. A summer school session, which draws students from within and outside the community, will begin at the end of the month, but it doesn’t create the same level of activity as the regular program. Most staff members are on a twelve-month work calendar, but professors are not in the building quite as regularly as during the fall or spring. It’s a good time for us to catch up on the work that doesn’t get done during the admissions frenzy. And, it’s when we transition to full attention on future students. That shift will soon be reflected in the blog, too.

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