SMC Staff Community Service Day

All of the participants!

Can you find me? I was struggling big time looking into the sun...

Last Wednesday all SMC faculty and staff we invited to participate in a campus wide community service day which included service both on campus and off. Colleagues participated in power washing campus buildings, picking up litter near the townhouses and cleaning the chapel as well as off campus service at Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, Catamount Outdoor Family Center, Winooski Senior Center, COTS and others.

I spent my morning at the Winooski Senior Center, where my group and I baked 9 dozen cupcakes for their BINGO event the next night. Two of the group members also went on Meals on Wheels routes throughout Winooski. It was so much fun to participate in service with a small group off SMC staff from all over campus, including athletics, Applied Linguistics, IT and both the English and Education Departments. We had a ton of fun baking and chatting, all for a good cause.

The Community Service Day was such a wonderful testament to the strong community that we have here on campus, among students as well as faculty and staff. It was a great way to kick off my first summer back at SMC as a staff member!

Commencement - Where to Now?

This Monday, the Saint Michael's College Class of 2011 officially became alumni! A huge congratulations goes out to each and every member of this influential and successful class.

Check out two videos that Mallory made to recap Commencement!

The common concern among recent graduates from any college is where they're off to next...but based on the statistics from the Career Development Office, the education that students receive at Saint Michael's College serves them well!

The most current statistics (for the class of 2010) indicate the following about the whereabouts of SMC grads six months after graduation:

70% full time employment

19% graduate school

9% part-time employment

7% full-time volunteer

2% other

(These numbers don't add up to 100% because some students are doing more than one of these things - i.e. part-time employment plus graduate school...)

Even with the current, difficult economic climate, Saint Michael's College graduates are out in the world, conquering their next steps. Congratulations to all, and welcome to the Alumni Association!

Threes

We've all heard the saying that bad things come in threes, and from the way things have been going around my apartment lately, I completely agree with this superstition :-)

I live in downtown Burlington with two close friends from SMC, Mallory and Dustin. All three of us work in Higher Ed, we all love to laugh and have fun, love Broadway and live very well together. However, one of the things about living in an apartment as opposed to a dorm is dealing with a property and all of the potential problems. The past few weeks have illustrated pretty much all of these problems.

First, our toilet broke. Not much detail needed here, but that was issue number one.

Second, our heat broke. Which led to us learning that our chimney was blocked, which then led to us learning that the blockage was a family of squirrels, which then led to our chimney sort of crumbling.

Finally, we turned on the TV last night, as we do every Tuesday night at 8:00 to watch GLEE, and it was all snowy and broken. I was nominated to call our cable company, and as I was talking, my roommates got a case of the giggles, which led to me not being able to stop laughing, and led to a very, very unproductive phone call with the poor woman who was supposed to be troubleshooting our TV. The end solution was to have a technician come out on Sunday, so hopefully we will be in a less giggly mood then.

Bottom line - living on your own (even with roommates) is filled with adult-like challenges. But I'm thankful to have a place to call home and wonderful friends to share that with!

Now on to fixing the Check Engine light in my car tomorrow...