Operation: In-Processing - COMPLETE

I hope you read the title for this post in a robot voice, because that's totally how it sounded in my head when I typed it.

Yesterday was the in-processing for this year's crop of Imaging Science High School Summer Interns! Yippee! Well, not really all that yippee - it's mostly waiting in line and paperwork and signatures. (Hey, kids - just wait until you someday buy a house.) But, it's the first time all of the selected interns are together, so that's exciting!

The day took a bit of preparation over the past month or so to set up - I had to coordinate with HR and the Registrar to make sure they would be prepared for the group, and I took care of all the paperwork on our end to prepare to get the interns entered into the system. I sent out the hire packets before I left for my big vacation, so the interns had a little over a month to fill out the necessary forms and gather all the additional documentation required. Even with that much prep time, invariably there is always at least one intern who forgets something important - so, a few of us may or may not have had a little secret pool going with guesses on how many would forget their papers. Well, we ALL ended up being wrong, because NONE of the interns forgot anything! Which makes me proud and happy (even though it means I lost the possibly-hypothetical pool).

Oh wait - there was one intern who forgot something... to show up! This was really disappointing to me, but I suppose this is the age and maturity level we can expect from high school students. I would hope that most of them would be very appreciative of this opportunity and take it very seriously, especially because for many of them it is their first job and the impressions made here can have a major impact on their future. And it should go without saying that even though the selected interns have made it "in" at this point, this is still a job that values professionalism and expects employees to act responsibly. Hopefully I can turn this into a learning experience, because really that's what this internship is all about.

Anyways... We had told the interns to show up by 3PM SHARP, and by 2:55 fewer than half had arrived. EEK. That was not looking good. 3:00 rolled around and we were up to 10 out of 14, so off we went with someone hanging behind for stragglers. One more caught up to us right outside the door, and we were on our way to HR. They were ready for us, and did a really fantastic job of getting everyone through smoothly. Two more of the missing three showed up (after waiting around for the final missing intern to show... I feel bad that they wasted their time...) and got all caught up. After all that we all made our way down to the Registrar's to get IDs. This was a bit of a lengthy process because even though they were ready for us, we couldn't split up the group like we could in HR; so once half of them were done with ID in hand, I took them to ITS to get computer accounts while the rest would catch up later. After that it was a trek across campus to the parking office to get parking permits, though the group had dwindled at this point because there were only 6 interns planning on driving that didn't already have permits.

And with that, processing was complete; and those 13 interns are now all ready to hit the ground running when they start on July 9 - only three weeks away! (I wonder if they are as excited to get started as I am for them?)