Intern Trek: Into Darkness

Today marked our interns' first official duty as interns: in-processing! Every year we bring in our new crop to get all of their paperwork, account requests, and IDs out of the way ahead of their actual start date, so that they are ready to hit the ground running on their first day (July 8). I sent them their paperwork well ahead of time, and coordinated with HR and the Registrar's Office so that everyone would be prepared. Well, as seems to be the trend with all of my well laid plans of late, of course something unexpectedly disruptive had to come up - this time, it was a power outage! Apparently a main line was disrupted by a construction vehicle near U of R, and half of RIT lost power. We still had power here in Carlson, but guess who didn't? That's right, HR, the Registrar, and everyone else in Eastman we were planning on visiting for in-processing. Yikes.

"Purported image from the scene"

Well, with no way to carry out what we needed to do, the plan was going to be to send the interns home and we'd just have to do it all on the first day. So much for all of my preparation! Luckily, an e-mail came out around 2:30PM saying that electrical service would be restored within an hour, which gave us hope for the interns, who were set to arrive by 3. We had no idea, however, whether service was actually restored, because for some reason a bunch of phone lines were disrupted as well; and when we tried to call over, no one was picking up. That didn't bode well, but we ventured forth with crossed fingers.

Luckily, when we made it over to Eastman their power was restored, so we were able to proceed as planned. Phew! Thankfully, there were no no-shows like last year. The only hiccup we experienced was a miscommunication between HR and the Registrar's, which just meant we sat around for a while longer than we needed to, so no big deal. It turned out that none of the interns would be driving themselves, so we were able to skip the walk down to the Parking Office, and everyone was done early. This gave me, Joe, and Bob some extra time for our planned Intern Mini-Retreat (because I'm not going to enough retreats lately), where we strategized some ways to approach the program this year and keep things fresh. We came up with a lot of great ideas that I think will make the intern program even better this year! Sorry, no spoilers; you'll just have to keep reading my blog all summer to see how it all unfolds. Okay, okay, one hint: no more "Challenges"...