Here We Are

Good afternoon everyone 🙂

Hope you all are having a good Wednesday! Hump day, as it were; it’s so much easier to wish everyone a happy Friday afternoon (as I did last year), than in the middle of the week :). But hopefully everything’s progressing along nicely in your lives!

All right, now down to business! 😉 This week’s post is going to be centered around swimming recruits, since last weekend was the first of the swim team’s “Recruit weekends.” We have three fall recruit weekends, and maybe two during the spring. During this time, 2-10 prospective students are invited on campus, where Carlos (our assistant coach) provides a very detailed, fantastic schedule so that they can have the best visit possible. I’ve been really pleased with how the swim team runs its recruit program—it’s the most organized out of all the sports teams here, I’m almost sure. What happens is that Carlos and the captains set up a google document for everyone in the team to fill out—activities are listed (e.g. “Bring the recruits to the hypnosis show from 7-8pm”, “Hang out in Charlotte’s room from 8-10pm”, “Team meals: EVERYONE ATTEND”), and we are all expected to make a strong showing (participate in many activities) in two out of the three weekends. It’s a fantastic system, because not only does it encourage us all to bond as a team and attend many of Wellesley’s events, but it shares the work and time of hosting a prospie, so that the overnight hostesses don’t have full responsibility. It’s an even better deal for the recruit, since she gets to meet the entire team over her stay (and thus have access to a wide pool of experiences, as well as attend anyone on the team’s classes), everyone’s excited to meet her (because we only get to hang out with her for a few hours!), there’s always something to do, and she gets to meet the other recruits since these are all team activities. We had nine recruits stay with us this weekend (this is a HUGE number), and everyone seemed to have had a great time, recruits and current team members alike :). I myself hosted Alexandra and brought her to Neuro 200 with me, since team members are paired with recruits with similar interests and Alexandra is looking into the neuroscience major :).

This is not the only time for prospective students (prospies) to visit campus; Wellesley’s admission office has a great many opportunities for prospective students to drop by year round! (… I actually just learned this myself, as I was writing this last sentence. Check out the admissions department website—I still have so much to learn!) Wellesley also has two massive prospie days—Discover Wellesley (which I believe was called Fall Open Campus last year, though don’t quote me on that) in October, and Spring Open Campus in April. Spring Open Campus is especially memorable—the whole Wellesley community chips in, with many students hosting up to three prospies for a couple of nights! During Spring Open campus, prospies attend lectures, classes, meals, and generally get the full prospective student experience; Spring Open Campus was what got me hooked on Wellesley. (Wellesley was my second choice all the way up to when I visited for the first time during Spring Open Campus. Then I called my parents, one day in, and told them I was coming here.) I think of recruit weekends as mini-Spring Open Campii, but with even more personal attention, since the whole swim and dive team is here to accommodate your every whim :). It’s very common for swimmers and divers to show up the morning after hosting a recruit yawning, because they stayed up late into the night discussing everything from school to sports (which are the two essentials, obviously :).)

I’d like to make a note here that when I write “swim team”, I am actually referring to the swim and diving team :). I often forgo the dive part of the description, only because we currently have 24 swimmers and two divers (which is no excuse!) However, one of the recruits we had this weekend was a diver, and we just got a fantastic new diving coach, Mary Ellen Clark, so I and the rest of the team are very excited and hopeful that diving will become a bigger program this year. The thing the remember, though, is that diving isn’t separated from swimming at all here—we do weights together, we practice at the same time, we do all the team activities together, we cheer for each other, and we’re generally a cohesive team. The only difference is that they do different things during practice (and that’s also true for different lanes during practice.) I’ve asked divers if they are ever offended that they’re lumped into the “swim” team; and while it differs for different people, Gabby says that she likes it, because diving would be very lonely on its own if they didn’t have a larger team to be a part of. I like that two different but related sports can join together to make a larger team; because since we all want to be here, doing what we love to do, the more the merrier :).

Alexandra was my second swimming recruit, as I hosted Erin last spring. Annie and Ika, both captains this year, were joking about their success rates as hostesses—I believe Annie was half and half for the recruits that she hosted coming back the next year and being a part of the team :). I was one of her successes—I stayed with Annie during Spring Open Campus last year (oh man, that was two years ago. Crazy.) and here I am! Not that was can actually keep ratings, of course, because the way the system works here, every (not just one) member of the swim team spends a substantial portion of time with each recruit, not to mention that despite everything that we do to make everyone’s stay the best we can, it all, in the end, depends on them :). Still, I am proud to say I am 1/1 as of right now (since Erin is now on the team!) and I can only hope Alexandra will find Wellesley a good fit.

There’s always something a little funny about advertising for a school, since prospies are always going to get a positively-biased account. This bias is lessened for the swim recruit visits, since everyone is required to participate (rather than volunteers during the school’s prospie weekends), but even so you can’t help thinking that everyone can’t be that enthusiastic all the time. And, to an extent, this is true: I hear much more about the good points of Wellesley than I do during the normal year. Moreover, these points are always much more thoughtfully articulated that during our normal conversations during the year.

This is why I think that recruit weekends aren’t just good for the prospies, but for us as well. People always ask me if writing this blog isn’t tiring, because I have to be happy and excited to be here all of the time (or if I’m not excited, I’d better have a logical and well-thought out reason for it ;)). It is somewhat tiring, just because writing something cohesive always takes a little brainpower, but it is energizing too. Telling someone else why you are here requires you to actually think about why you are here, and I find that this process always makes me acknowledge things that I enjoy, that I am grateful for, that—with a busy schedule and tasks to worry about— I never would have thought about otherwise.

That’s why these posts sometimes end up with “I am so happy and I love it here and I am SO grateful for everything I have” paragraphs, because it’s only when I sit down to write them that I have these realizations: that I am grateful for what happened to me way back in the week, I just didn’t have time to acknowledge it then. I think that hosting propies generates the same emotions—you get the same energy, the feeling that yes, I DO love it here, and then you can share that newly-refound joy with someone else. It’s an incredibly encouraging feeling, especially sharing with someone who is intensely interested and invested in what you have to say. You don’t lie at all, or tell people that something about Wellesley is great when it actually isn’t, but you are more conscious of what is good here, remembering a way of looking at life that is often buried among all of our other concerns.

So though we all want our recruits to come back next year, and to have had a good time during their stay, I believe recruit visits are as much for us as they are for them. They get a great experience, the opportunity to talk with many Wellesley students, to attend classes and get a small feel for life on campus. We get to spend time with our teammates, tell our stories, remember our enthusiasm, and share our love for what we do, and who we are.

I hope you that you all have the opportunity to come and visit, and that you’ll love Wellesley as much as we do :).

Best to you all,

Monica