Take a Long, Hard Look

When you craft a piece for mailing, take a long, hard look at the cover and ask yourself, does this really make sense?

Example: I got this piece from New York University on Tuesday. Yeah, I'm one of "those people" who sign up to be on schools' mailing list.

Check it out. At the top, it clearly says "Spring in New York."

So I read it again. I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. It's spring right now. The season is almost over. Did they flake and send this piece late?"

When I opened it, it became clear it was for spring semester 2009.

But then I thought, most students give their mail a quick scan and decide to open it or not. I reacted probably like most students would: spring is passed, I'm dumping this thing and not opening it.

So moral of the story, consider your cover quickly and carefully. Do a snap judgment and see if it gets your interest and just plain makes sense.

And to all my readers, I wish a happy and healthy Memorial Day. Even while the cost of gas and food is rising, it doesn't cost anything to sit at home and enjoy a day off.

Being Comfy At Work

So I wish I could write something constructive to all of you about Web sites or creativity today, but I can't.

I'm freezing my U butt off here.

They turned on the AC in our building for the summer, and man, is it on. Keep in mind, right now it's 50 and cloudy outside my window. Inside, it's probably 58 from what we can estimate.

Even people who normally aren't cold walk in our office and stop dead in their tracks.

So yeah, it's hard enough for us to satisfy the basic human need of keeping our body heat up, let alone come up with fantastic marketing work today.

This has gotten me thinking about comfortable working environments. Namely, how if you're not comfortable, your productivity goes way down. I talked last week about dress code and how wearing stuffy dress-up clothes only to sit in your cubicle and design all day is kind of pointless. The same goes for temperature. If you're freezing, your work ain't gonna be pleasing.

Granted, I'm always cold (example: I wore hoodies during the car trip to Virginia Beach last year when it was 90 outside), so I try to wear sweaters year round and have blankets and space heaters handy.

But maybe there's something else that makes your workspace uncomfortable. Could be your chair, maybe you don't have enough personalization (like photos from home or nick-knacks), or how about the coworker who feels the need to sing along repeatedly to the same Celine Dion song (yes, this happened to me)?

Some times we need to speak up and take action to change things for the better and to help ourselves work better. It's not about being demanding or a prima donna. It's about simple, basic things to improve the quality of our work and our work life. As depressing as it is to think, we spend at least 8 waking hours here each day. They should be the most pleasant they can be.

And now, I leave you with a photo of me hunkered down for the rest of the day.

Will One Sentence Make a Difference?

Maybe this post is my catharsis to get some negative thoughts off my chest (thoughts that I feel guilty for having). But do you think one sentence will make a difference toward environmental responsibility?

One of our vendors sent us an e-mail announcing a new Web site a few weeks back. At the bottom of it was a sentence that said something like:

"Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this e-mail."

My boss wants us to look at developing something similar for people here at our U to use in our e-mails.

I'm all for trying to help the environment, but the smarty-pants side of my brain asks, "Will anyone even read this and really think twice?"

I don't know about you, but at our school, the bottoms of e-mails are littered with personal sayings and those long legal statements about confidentiality. I usually ignore that whole space.

I'm thinking if I'm like that, maybe the rest of the e-mail using world feels the same.

Do you think this one sentence would make a difference to you for printing out e-mails?

And I have to say, if you do find yourself printing out a lot of e-mails, I recommend creating a folder system in your e-mail inbox for reference items you find you need quite often. My e-mail box is organized this way, and I can find something faster there than digging through physical files of print-outs.

The False Alarm Last Night

So there I was, finished watching the season finale of "The Office" when the phone rings. It's my Dad. "The 10 o'clock news just said University Hall and the Memorial Field House are on fire," he said.

I was stunned.

University Hall is the huge, iconic building where I work on campus, complete with a bell tower and gargoyles. The Memorial Field House is right next door, and that's the building that's undergoing a complete interior renovation and is set to open spring 2009 with 50-some new classrooms. All I could think was all that work for nothing now! And I was thinking about my office -- all the memories we would lose if the office was damaged, not to mention most of our files and works in progress.

I panicked and jumped online. No local sources except the paper had any mention of the fire, and the paper said it was only the Field House.

Bless my husband, who knew I probably wouldn't sleep until I knew everything was OK. He started the car and drove me up the street 2 miles to the University.

When we got close, I breathed a sigh of relief. The University Hall tower was still standing and no smoke clouds were in the air. It looked like the Field House was OK, too, as the outside of the building looked just as it had when I left work at 5 pm that afternoon.

There were some fire trucks around. We snapped these poor photos as close as we could get, just to remember the night.

The first one is down a sort-of alley, with the back of the Field House to the right of the screen. Everything looked OK. No smoke, no flames.

The second shows the parking garage near the Field House. Just beyond where that crosswalk is, there were fire trucks and barricades.

Today, I haven't seen any news reports of what happened and our Web site has nothing up. I'm off today, so I guess I'll have to go in on Monday and get the scoop. But it seems like it was a minor fire.

Still, for about 10 minutes last night, I was in an absolute panic. I sympathize with everyone who's actually lived through a fire at their school.

Dressing Down for Success

Maybe I'm sensitive to this issue because my school is having a cultural dress clash (we're kinda laid back and we merged with a medical school who's "professional dress" 24/7 about 2 years ago).

I was at a CASE Webinar today (which was awesome) about "Utilizing In-Depth Interviews and Focus Groups to Advance Your Branding and Marketing Strategies."

During it, my coworker and I asked the speaker, Elizabeth Scarborough, a question about dress.

We go into high schools to do focus groups and talk with students. Our impression has been that if we dress more formally (which we often get pressure to do, because we're "representing our institution") you can kinda tell the students view us as "suits" instead of people to actually talk honestly to.

So we asked Scarborough if dressing formally would make a difference. Her response: Yes!

In fact, she recommended that people going into such a situation wear something like jeans and a polo shirt to mirror the students' environment.

I found this interesting because our admissions office staff tend to dress casual, but again, they're getting pressure to dress up with sports coats, etc.

If I'm a high school student coming in, I'm going to be intimidated sitting across from a guy in a suit coat and tie versus a man in a polo shirt or even dress shirt.

Likewise, I think about some of the parents and families we have come into our admission office. My parents -- back when we toured campuses -- were not dressed to the nines. In fact, we kinda felt "out of place" at a few schools we went where the staff was dress formally. Heck, we were dress to walk around campus in the blazing sun for an hour for a campus tour!

I was usually embarrassed about the way I had dressed, felt poor, and got the impression that I wouldn't fit in at the school. I didn't go to any of those places, needless to say.

So dress for success, readers, whether that means suit coat, tie, flip flops, jeans or a T-shirt! Think about how you're being perceived by the students and parents/family members you work with.

Letting Go

This probably seems like an odd topic when a lot of us are struggling with doing the job of 3 people. But letting go when some help finally arrives can be a difficult thing.

I say this because our office is expanding and many desperately needed position are getting filled. D.W. no longer finds she has to work 60-plus hours a week to stay above water. I actually see my co-workers getting office time, instead of constantly running from meeting to meeting to cover everything around campus. We're able to touch base and communicate better, in many ways.

But beneath all this, there's the difficulty in letting go. You know, when you are doing 50 million things, it makes you feel good and important because people need you. Take some of those things away, and well ... you could feel a bit less valuable around the office.

It's also frustrating because you can feel out of the loop. Projects you nurtured and grew are suddenly someone else's concern. You get updates here and there, but it's not the same. Or maybe you hear about things weeks later secondhand, when you used to be right there in the middle of the action.

I say all this because my co-worker and I were having an IM conversation about our office: how we feel out of the loop on some of the major projects. But then we realized, the reason we feel out of it is because we were doing too much to begin with. We shouldn't have been worrying about all those things in the first place -- it was too much for one or two people to take on.

Letting go can be difficult at first, but man, does it feel good some days not to have to worry about certain things again. It also feels good to actually leave at 5, instead of 7 pm.

Why is Graduate Enrollment Not as Important?

That's the question I'm asking myself after a meeting this morning.

If undergraduate enrollment needs something done, our U will usually move heaven and earth to make it happen. But with graduate enrollment, the efforts are all over the place and there's not really a set, dedicated budget for graduate recruitment (that I'm aware of). Some departments essentially run their own admissions, others rely on the central College of Graduate Studies office.

I bet at some schools, graduate enrollment is probably more important than it is here. But let's be honest, when it comes down to the numbers fall semester, most are going to care more about the undergraduate numbers than the graduate ones.

I wonder why it is that we don't seem to handle this set of graduate students as well as undergrads.

Could it be that the programs they're in are just so diverse — i.e. a law degree versus a history one -- that it's too difficult to market graduate education as a whole at such-and-such a school?

Could it be that we view graduate students as the end of the gravy train? In other words, we get them into our schools as undergrads, hopefully they buy into the experience for a graduate degree already, and after that, we can't market much more to them. So our efforts wane as the years roll on ...

Or could it be -- as our graduate recruiter suggested today -- that we view prospective students as more mature? That they don't need all the hand-holding, information, and step-by-step that undergrads do. (When in actuality, maybe they do).

Just thinking out loud about this.