Tour of the Student Activities Office

Some of you have probably been to the Office of Student Activities in Schwarm.  You've perhaps seen it on a rare good day when everything is looking clean and uncluttered (unlikely, but possible on rare occasions).  Or perhaps you've seen it on one of it's messiest and craziest just-finished-with-Fall Fest-or-Casino Night-or-another-humongous-program days.  Like this:

After Fall Fest in 2010

But for those of you who don't get to see it all that often, I thought I'd take you on a tour of a "typical summer day" in the Office of Student Activities and Orientation.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I did straighten up a little bit pre-pictures, but it wasn't a full blown scrub-down or anything. 

You saw a picture of Schwarm Commons last week in this post, and the Office of Student Activities (or OSA, for short), is right off the commons.  Right smack in the middle of the action.  From the commons, you see this view:

The right door is always open as long as we're in the office and not in a meeting, just as pictured.  Usually we have about 10 flyers on the left hand door describing upcoming events.  It's a great spot for students to stop and see what programs are coming up. 

If you walk in and look to the right, you see Tammy Lane's desk area.  Tammy is the Program Associate for the Office and works half-time here and half-time in the Gym with the Athletic Department.  Here is view of her area:

 

Notice the amazing tie-dyed Relay for Life sign.  I was so proud of the students who worked on this banner (Lauren, Shayna & Leah).  They really went all out, hand cutting each of those letters and silhouette people out of black fabric!  Those yellow boxes are packs of 100 popsicles each (for our popsicle breaks during Orientation.  We have three more boxes in addition to these as well!  Hmmm... you might be seeing a "Free Popsicle" event in the first few weeks of school this year....

Here is the other angle of Tammy's area:

That copier is fairly new - we've had it for about a year.  And it is about 10 bazillion times better than our last copier, which was literally from 1991, worked only sporadically, and spewed out shoddy black and white copies.  I'm pretty sure it was worse than the copier from Office Space, and it was about one error message shy of meeting it's fate the same way:

I also love the bulletin boards in the office, decorated by Emily and Leah, my student workers last year.  If you turn around to the left side of the office, this is your view:

We have one workstation for student workers or student organization officers.  Our little fridge and microwave get a ton of action, especially during the school year and the Commons' microwave is broken!  You can kind of make out the stacks of paper on the desk going from the microwave to the back wall - that is symbolic of summertime in the office, and it's all the "stuff" that we put in the folders at Orientation. 

Here is a closeup of the games on top of the overhead shelves:

We have a great game-rental system, where students can just bring us their Miami Student ID card and we hang on to it while they borrow the game (for free).  When the game is returned to us, we return the ID card to the student. 

On the other side of the wall is my personal office (and a bookshelf for storage):
 

You can't always see the top of the desk.  I usually have about 10 different project I'm working on at the same time, so it's very difficult to keep everything tidy! 

So.  Now you know where the magic happens.  It's a small office for the amount of traffic we see coming in and out everyday and for the amount of "stuff" we do, but it's been good to us so far. I'll be sure to do this again in the throes of fall semester, because it's actually quite calm in the office over the summer and such is not the case during the school year. And we're always changing things up, too! 

Look for a post soon from Jeff Gambrell about his recent service trip to Haiti!  He promises lots of stories and pictures.