This would be it.  It’s maybe the mid 40s and a pelting rain.  Just miserable weather.  It’s only supposed to get up to 50 today, but to 75 by the end of the week.  Between the rapid temperature changes and the influx of pollen that’s getting ready to drop out of the trees, I predict campus will have a wave of spring colds in the very near future.

Looking out my window, I do see a few brave souls who are making the trek to the bookstore for Starbucks.  For the alumni out there who have not been to campus recently, the bookstore is not what it used to be.  They have done a great job remodeling the inside - with big, comfy couches, a gas log fireplace, and self serve Starbucks coffee.  There are a number of faculty and staff on campus who make it a daily ritual to get the morning java - and normally I would be among them, but for this hideous weather.  Today I made myself a cup of tea in the office and am content to stay indoors.

It is practically impossible to work today.  The weather is absolutely perfect - maybe mid 70s, slight breeze, and the air feels so clean and clear.  It’s the kind of day where if I was still a student, I’d want to sit on a bench or one of the walls on the Quad and just *be*.  A cold beverage wouldn’t hurt either.

Late yesterday I received the happiest news I’ve heard all week:  one of my very favorite students, senior James Scott, just got a job offer.

Every student is happy to know they are going to be gainfully employed following graduation, but for James (or “Scooter,” which is what his friends call him), this takes on extra special importance.

My office came to know James because he is a need-based scholarship recipient and he graciously agreed to let us tell his story - one of his family’s dramatic financial reversals and a lot of hardship during his high school years.  Against all odds - or perhaps despite them, because James has more grit and determination than most people I’ve met - he got into Wake Forest and was able to come here with a generous financial aid package.  That financial aid was provided by alumni, parents, and friends who give to the College Fund.  

James’ story is featured in the March Wake Forest Magazine if you have not read it:  http://www.wfu.edu/magazine/2008.03/constantandtrue/

Because he wrote it himself, this article does not adequately capture what a tremendous human being James is.  He is unlike anyone I have ever met.  Despite having some terrific difficulties, he is so full of gratitude and feels blessed to be here.   I am not sure that I could have had as many hard knocks and still remained positive and full of hope.

My office is celebrating his job offer this Friday afternoon with cake.  If you have not met this remarkable young man and want to join us, meet us in the Alumni Office at 3 p.m. Friday.

Way to go, Scooter!

A few reflections on students today vs. the students in the 1988-92 timeframe when I was here:

In the late 80s…girls did not carry purses. You carried a backpack, never a bag (lest you look like a freshman). Female students today proudly carry purses. Maybe it’s because people have cellphones and laptops now and need a bag for all their gadgets.

Speaking of backpacks, in the late 80s it was de rigueur to carry them on one shoulder only. It was looked upon as odd if you used both straps. Students today strap them on properly using both straps.

Another anomaly I see with students is that very few of our students seem to own umbrellas. They will walk in the rain getting soaked. I don’t remember my generation doing that, but it seems to me if their average SATs are higher than ours were back in the day, they would all have umbrellas.

And in addition to being issued a laptop upon arrival at WFU, I am convinced we also give out North Face fleece jackets and flip flops, since that seems to be a core part of the WFU student uniform of today.

Hand hurts, so I should stop here. More deep thoughts tomorrow!

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PS - looked out my window around lunchtime and saw two women on Segway personal transportation devices - you know, those funny looking upright scooter things:  http://www.segway.com/individual/learn-how-works.php).   The Segways had a McDonald’s logo and were advertising their Premium Roast coffee, and it looked like the Segway drivers had coupons.

After a few days off for my hand to start healing, I am back in the saddle and back in the office.  So far I am not that much worse for wear except an ugly bandage and I make a lot of typos, as my hand does not quite stretch as much as it should : )  Typos are a pet peeve of mine so I am hoping to catch them all before I let this go live.

Today is a beautiful sunny day on campus.  Unlike yesterday, when we actually had snow flurries for a while (and a colleague texted me about the snow and said that it meant heck was freezing over!).  The flowers and trees are starting to bloom and in another week or two it will arguably be the prettiest time to be on campus.

I have often wondered what first time visitors to the campus think when they drive in off the Silas Creek/Reynolda entrance and see oceans of daffodils and the gorgeous creeping phlox and all the wonderful landscaping.  Particularly in the spring, when everything is blooming, it feels a bit like our own little slice of heaven.

Well, now that my hand surgery has reduced me to hunting and pecking : ) for a few days, I thought I’d link you to a couple of alumni-relates stories in the Old Gold and Black. Props to our current OGB writers for focusing on alumni!

“We all know about Tim Duncan, Chris Paul, Brian Piccolo, Arnold Palmer and all of those freaking athletes, but with our small size and location, we do not often hear about notable alumni outside of the sports realm.
There are a few. Granted there haven’t been any US Presidents or major Hollywood players, but there have been those that have brought attention to the University by making their mark on the world. In a society where celebrities are not usually those behind the scenes, you may not know all of these names, but each of these alums has accomplished a lot since their Demon Deacon days.” http://www.oldgoldandblack.com/l_article/wait_they_went_to_wake/

“A university alumnus who was a star within the “Wake Forest Bubble” has gone on to find even greater success in the outside world. Christopher Magiera, an operatic singer who received a Bachelor of Arts from Wake Forest, is now a prominent voice on the national opera scene.” http://www.oldgoldandblack.com/article/alumnus_makes_waves_in_musical_world/

Magiera graduated from the university in 2005 after a distinguished career which included membership in the Wake Forest Concert Choir, and a cappella group Temporary Reprieve and a role in L’isola disabiata, which the university produced in his senior year.

Break is over for the students. They are back on campus, back to studying, back to the routine. It’s good to see the Quad active again. The most traffic I have seen today is students on their way to/from the Subway on the Quad. (I heard a rumor that the Benson Center Pizza Hut is no longer operating..? If this is true, Subway will get even more popular.) It’s back to work for our staff as well following our retreat. It’s good to be back and have that sense of renewed energy, commitment and vigor.

The Alumni Office is working on a series of events planned for later this spring in conjunction with the administration and the athletic department. This will be your “All Access” pass to our key leaders and coaches - a chance to have an intimate conversation about many of the exciting things we envision for Wake Forest. Our initial foray looks like it will be to Charlotte, Atlanta, Greensboro and Raleigh - with plans to expand to some of our other areas of greatest alumni populations this fall.

If you live in one of these areas, keep your eyes on your mailbox and.or emailbox for more information. And to leave this with you as a teaser, your “All Access” pass at this event will hopefully give you a sneak preview of something really special. But you have to be there to see it.

No blog tomorrow, out for hand surgery. Hope to hunt and peck my way back very quickly. So stay tuned!

University Advancement (which includes the Alumni Office, development, parent and donor relations, technology and more) is on a staff retreat designed to help us bond as a team and think strategically about how we can help Wake Forest move forward.  It has been a wonderful series of meetings.  Very enlightening, very helpful.

In so many ways, I wish all of you that read this blog could be here too and see the energy, passion, and love our group has for Wake Forest.  We have an amazing team.  Great people.  Just like during my time at Wake Forest, our team feels like family to me.  Which I know sounds cliched and hackneyed, but it’s true.  We are friends and colleagues.  I have always believed that Wake Forest’s most special quality is its people.  We are exceptional.  And I feel so fortunate to work here.

In the coming months, we’ll have some exciting things to show you.  But not yet.  So you will have to be patient.

Enjoy your day!

PS - we also celebrated St. Patty’s day together in a very fun way, replete with green beads, hats, feather boas, and celtic nametags (because the Alumni Office wouldn’t host an event without nametags!)  In what could be termed my ultimate act of geekdom, I chose names based on the Dolmen collection of the Rare Books Room in the ZSR library and the WFU Press that specializes in Irish literature.  I also threw in an old boyfriend’s name (Paddy McGuigan, how Irish is that?) and 3 fictional characters.  I got to be the fictional Molly Bloom from Ulysses, since I did my dissertation on James Joyce.  “Yes I said yes I will yes.” is her most famous line.

Normally at 5 the bells of Wait Chapel are ringing.  There are student carilloneurs who practice nearly every day.  Occasionally you hear one of your favorite hymns, or the odd wrong note.  It’s good to hear them practice and make the occasional mistake because it reminds you that there is a real person in there playing and not some pre-programmed computer.

I got to take a tour of the bell tower a few years ago.  It is not for the faint of heart or those afraid of heights, as it involves a lot of stairs.  There is a window high up on Wait Chapel, above the bells.  If you dare to take the tiny metal stairs that high, you can practically see until forever.  It’s especially lovely in the fall when the trees have changed.

The bells are not chiming today.  Monday, when the students are back, we’ll hear them again.  And for those of you actually following the blog, the Alumni Office will be out at a retreat on Monday and Tuesday, and unless I get good wireless connection there, the blog will be on hold.  I am having some hand surgery later next week and we’ll have to see if I can still blog or if I will invite some guest bloggers to do the honors.  I’ve been working with voice-recognition software but it has not been a great success.  I will give an example:  I am going to end this blog by using the voice recognition software to say “Have a great weekend.  Thanks, and Go Deacs”  - let’s see how well the software translates that:

“Padraig and banks and indeed is” (first try)

“Have a great meeting in banks and can be as” (second try)

“have a great weekend banks and go the next ” (I give up!)

Campus today is even quieter. Many of my colleagues are at the ACC Tournament to watch our Deacs. They lost to FSU 70-60 today. I know this is not the way anyone wanted our season to end, particularly after the heartbreak of losing Skip Prosser in July. But our team will bounce back, and so will we.

It seems fitting to remember Coach Prosser today because of the tournament. I was on vacation when I heard the news - checking my email one final time before a long flight home from a tropical destination. “Wake’s coach died” was the subject line I think. I could not believe it. I got back in time for his funeral, which I watched in Wait Chapel with several hundred others.

The next day, the funeral home brought tons of flower arrangements to campus. They placed them all outside the front of the chapel. To the right, closest to Huffman House dorm, were arrangements from the other Big 4 schools - Duke blue and white roses, Carolina blue and white roses, NC State red and white roses.

For some reason, those three solitary wreaths of flowers spoke volumes to me. They seemed very quiet and dignified and I was glad to see the other schools paying tribute to Coach. I wish I had a picture of it.

In my post yesterday about the Quad being filled with dirt and grass seed…well, I was only half right.  As I left work, I could tell by the smell that it was not dirt, but compost.  I ran into one of the Gurus of Grass at the grocery store lastnight and he confirmed it for me.  So that is the secret of the lush, lush grass. 

Spring break is here, and it is very, very quiet.  I’d be willing to bet that at least 90% of our students are gone this week - many of them to warm destinations for a beach week, some of them to their parents’ house or to go to a friend’s place.  I kept looking out my window this morning to see if I saw any students - and I did not see one until 10:22.  It was a young man in shorts and a hoodie who was going out for a run.  

Most of the activity on the Quad today is limited to Facilities, who are laying down what looks like fresh dirt and grass seed.  This is part of the yearly ritual of prepping the Quad for Commencement.  I am not sure how our Facilities folks get the Quad grass to be as thick and lush as a carpet, but they do a fabulous job.  One of my favorite things to do Commencment weekend is to walk barefoot on the grass.  It feels heavenly. 

For the years that I was at Wake Forest, the Quad was chained off to keep the grass pretty.  Many of you remember Dr. Smiley, who would scold you if you walked on the grass.  “The grass cries!” he’d say - or so I am told by one of my college friends who was trying to sneak thru.  

The chains came down a few years ago and students walk all over the grass, play Ultimate Frisbee, catch some sun, read a book.  I like it much better this way, truthfully.  But old habits die hard and I mostly walk on the sidewalks.  Except during graduation when the grass is at its finest.

Yesterday we received the terrible news that the president of the UNC student body, a young woman named Eve Carson, was found murdered. Everything that I have read about her revealed her to be a woman of exceptional talent and promise - a Morehead Scholar, a student leader, a person for whom service and volunteering came naturally - all around the kind of student you’d love to know. Not at all unlike the typical Wake Forest student, actually.

This is senseless and tragic and horrible. And no matter how much I have ribbed UNC in the past or disliked some of their basketball coaches or players, today I feel like crying Carolina blue. Because it is terrible to lose someone so young and so beloved by her friends and classmates.

I know a little something about what UNC and her poor family is feeling, because I lost a sister to gun violence years ago. There are not good words to describe it. But today another poor family is joining what I call “The Club” - and it’s a club no one wants to be a member of.

Deacs everywhere, I hope today you will take a moment to think of Eve and observe a moment of silence for her, her family, and the Carolina campus. Though they are normally our rivals, today they are our neighbors and brethren and they can use all the thoughts and prayers they can get.

Eve Carson, 1985–2008: Carolina loses a special person

This morning the Quad is covered in little orange flags.  It’s 10 weeks until commencement and preparations are already beginning.  Spring break is about to begin, which is the ideal time for Facilities to begin putting down new grass seed and getting the Quad ready to be lush and green for graduation.

There are a number of things that will take place in the coming weeks to prep the Quad.  In addition to seeding and probably working on drainage issues (there are a couple of places that perennially puddle when it rains), they are laying the groundwork for screens so that commencement can be seen even by those at the very back of the 10,000 chairs that are on the Quad that morning.  The screens will help with Baccalaureate too, so people can watch it outside. 

I am especially somber today while looking at the Quad.  We have to put one of our dogs down today.  He is an 11 year old black lab with terrible hip dysplasia.  I used to bring him to campus all the time when he was younger.  He loved to be here and would strain on the leash to run to every student he saw to try and get them to pet him.  Now instead of a black and gold dog we will only have the gold one left.  A sad day for us.

We just announced Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne as our commencement speaker.  And inevitably, people ask me how did the University choose the speaker, what are our criteria for determining a speaker, etc.

Obviously you want to get someone who will deliver a meaningful message.  A respected individual who will bring something special to the campus and the graduates.   I think  students would like to have Jon Stewart or Oprah or someone famous in a pop culture sense (maybe not as interesting to their parents, who knows).  A lot of schools get some of those big name speakers because they pay the speakers to come - often at shockingly high speaker fees.

Wake Forest does not pay its commencement speaker.  I am proud of this fact, because it means that we are using the University’s resources on other things - our students, our faculty - and not on a 15 minute speech.   

The challenge this raises, though, is that we have to have a personal connection to a speaker to get them to speak gratis.  We look to our alumni, parents, and friends with connections to key speakers to help us.     If you have a connection to a world-class speaker, please do let us know.   

The scholarship interviews ended today. 42 fantastic students representing amazing talent (including a charming magician originally from Australia who boggled our minds with a magic trick during his interview). Our committee likes to pose the occasional unusual question (just to break up the seriousness) and talked about the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, where Calvin has a “transmogrifier” which will change him into any kind of animal he chooses.

And so we pose to these scholarship applicants - which animal would you ‘transmogrify’ into?

There were a startling number of eagles. Lots of kids evidently want to know how to fly and soar - and metaphorically this works for them because as students of exceptional achievement, in a way they are already soaring in their high schools and communities. We got several other birds as well - peacock, wren, pelican. But eagle was at the top of the list.

Surprisingly (at least to me), two potential students said “ant” because they wanted to get a perspective of what it would be like to live in such an ordered society, and/or because every day would be a challenge of having to keep from getting stepped on - and yet you can lift ten times your own weight. These young men and women had such interesting perspectives.

My gold star for the day goes to the guy who said with great enthusiasm “a wombat!” Well done!

I am in scholarship interviews today for the Presidential Scholarship, which is a talent-based scholarship at WFU.  Over the next 2 days, I will meet 42 of the most promising potential freshmen, whose talents range from theatre to singing to music to debate, dance, entrepreneurship.  These young men and women are amazingly talented and remarkably self-possessed for their ages.  It actually makes me feel a little bit unaccomplished to be with this group.

We ask these students how they learned about Wake Forest - as some are coming from Montana and Missouri and places not typically associated with our admissions base.  Many hear of us first through athletics.  When we ask the students what they have noticed or felt while on campus (they’ve been here since Sunday night), they all say without hesitation that they are amazed at how friendly and welcoming everyone is to them.  They are all astonished at our sense of community.

As an alumna and an employee, this makes me incredibly proud.  I am glad that newcomers to our campus can feel our warmth and our family feel.  This is an enduring Wake Forest value that I cherish.

Back to the interviews!