Summer at last
May 23, 2007 in Advising
Here’s installment No. 1 from me, in a blog about advising college media. #
Summer’s here, at least in academia. In our world here, that means going, overnight, from 100 mph to about 10 mph. The students won’t be back for another month, and it’s eerily quiet in this newsroom. Time to clean house, literally. I rolled a big trash bin over to my office door yesterday and have been raising a dust cloud by pitching stuff. Piles of newspapers. Scraps of paper with irrelevant notes from last September. More piles of newspapers. Folders full of articles and instructional handouts that I saved and read, but now have little use. #
I was born with a packrat gene. (Want proof? Here you go.) My offices, both at work and at home, are crammed with boxes of newspapers, sports and journalism memorabilia. Most of it is useless to anyone but me (and honestly, most of it is useless to me, too). “Someday when I die,†I tell my kids, “all of this will be yours.†No such promises here at the Star, so I perform my annual May ritual. This year I’m going even deeper into the dust. Some of the stuff I’m dumping, I haven’t touched in years. I tell myself, “I think I’ll be OK without these writers workshop notes from 1998.†As of this writing, the dishwasher-sized trash bin is two-thirds full. I’m going to need another one by later today. #
Housecleaning is something I never had time to do when I was an editor and reporter, because there never was a down period. Every day of every year, you feed the monster. So the junk just piles up – both literally and figuratively. One of the best parts about college media, for advisers, is that there’s always a finish line in sight. Maybe life and a career are best tackled in bite-sized chunks, with seasonal opportunities to digest, reassess and look ahead. It certainly takes the stress level down. That’s something I remind myself during the more frustrating days of advising: That this is a pretty good life, and one that a lot of my friends in the newspaper biz would kill for. I’ll take vacation time in the coming days and weeks, work ahead on staff training plans for late summer, visit a few newsrooms in our area, and learn some multimedia skills I’ve needed to catch up on. For this week, though, it’s back to the dust cloud. #
I'm busy filling some recycling and garbage bins myself. This time of the year does allow us to catch up and prepare for the next year. I clean the office but know it will not stay this way for long. Oh well.
Great first blog entry. You certainly characterized the end of the year perfectly.
Your comment: "Housecleaning is something I never had time to do when I was an editor and reporter, because there never was a down period. Every day of every year, you feed the monster. So the junk just piles up – both literally and figuratively."
My first assignment began less than an hour after I arrived at my job, and I haven't yet had time to sort through what's left behind to figure out what's actually important. That would explain why there's an entire drawer of the filing cabinent at my desk filled with folders and papers that I'm sure the former reporter knew exactly what they contained but about which I — after opening it one day and seeing them — haven't the slightest clue.
Four months into my beat, I haven't touched them once. As for the old school board packets she had lining the shelf at my desk? Well, I needed room for new material. So one day, I decided I was probably pretty safe removing anything pre-2006 and just pitched them all without concern. That's what the archives are there for.
It's circular ending…there's always a deadline so there's always a pile of stuff, and there's always new ideas to accumulate, and there are always summer classes, and there's the twice-annual magazine, and the orientation issue, and the computer clean-up to strip old files, and the password changing, and the recruitment of new students, and the mentoring of the incoming editor-in-chief, and the instructions for new software installation, and purchase orders, and process mapping for new systems…well, that's my excuse for a hopelessly cluttered office. Is this the support group?
Cathy