The Heritage Weekend
Thursday evening the high schoolers arrived on campus for this year's Heritage weekend. It's a scholarship competition, where 100 or so high schoolers are invited based on their SAT scores. On Monday at work, I signed my suite up to host one of them, and agreed to work with the Admissions department on Friday during the interview sessions.
Two years ago I was invited, and went trembling into the interview and essay competititons. I ended up not winning, but looking back it was good times. Last year I was the student rep for one of the interview committees, asking questions and rating the students' responses.
This year I served as a door monitor, and wow, I had so much better of a time with it.
I arrived at the Advancement Center at 1 sharp. It's LeTourneau's alum buiding, so it has a nice lobby and coference room. The committee members arrived shortly after and set up.
My job, as door monitor, is just to ensure the students coming in that they are in the right place, and to talk to them. The poor students were, as I remember being, incredibly nervous going into the interview, and reeling from it afterwards.
Normally I am so shy about being forced to make small talk with complete strangers but for some reason it just clicked yesterday. I really enjoyed just talking to about a dozen high school seniors from all over the place. They were from North Carolina, Houston, New Mexico, even one guy flew from Vienna, Austria.
I got to talk to one guy's mom during his interview, just to find out that his sister is already a student here. I was surprised at how many little brothers of current students were Heritage scholars.
Some of them were very much at ease (one girl from Chicago said that if I ever visit there I should eat pizza. She recommended a few restaurants.) Others were nice but so very uptight, and it was a really good feeling to get one sincere laugh out of them. I really think it was better preparation for an interview than even getting to see the questions.
So that was a 4-hour work session better than my typical one.
Two years ago I was invited, and went trembling into the interview and essay competititons. I ended up not winning, but looking back it was good times. Last year I was the student rep for one of the interview committees, asking questions and rating the students' responses.
This year I served as a door monitor, and wow, I had so much better of a time with it.
I arrived at the Advancement Center at 1 sharp. It's LeTourneau's alum buiding, so it has a nice lobby and coference room. The committee members arrived shortly after and set up.
My job, as door monitor, is just to ensure the students coming in that they are in the right place, and to talk to them. The poor students were, as I remember being, incredibly nervous going into the interview, and reeling from it afterwards.
Normally I am so shy about being forced to make small talk with complete strangers but for some reason it just clicked yesterday. I really enjoyed just talking to about a dozen high school seniors from all over the place. They were from North Carolina, Houston, New Mexico, even one guy flew from Vienna, Austria.
I got to talk to one guy's mom during his interview, just to find out that his sister is already a student here. I was surprised at how many little brothers of current students were Heritage scholars.
Some of them were very much at ease (one girl from Chicago said that if I ever visit there I should eat pizza. She recommended a few restaurants.) Others were nice but so very uptight, and it was a really good feeling to get one sincere laugh out of them. I really think it was better preparation for an interview than even getting to see the questions.
So that was a 4-hour work session better than my typical one.
