This is the official Campus Kids-NJ Blog, where Tom and Jeremy write about what's going on at Campus Kids year round! Check back often. If you have questions, suggestions, ideas, requests or anything else, we'd love to hear from you: tom@campuskids.com or jeremy@campuskids.com . Guest bloggers are welcome!



Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Staff Conversations

We do a lot of different things to prepare for summer camp, but none is more important than selecting and training our staff. Without a skilled, caring staff there is no Campus Kids as we know it.We need to recruit qualified applicants (that story is for another blog) and then process their applications (which include references). For those who appear qualified, we schedule an interview. No staff member -- whether they live near or far, whether we already know them (former camper) or not -- must have this interview, which most often means a conversation with me. We try to meet in-person, but that's not always possible because some of our staff live in other parts of the U.S., or even other countries. In those cases, I do a phone/Skype interview, and I have to say that I've done many of these over the years. I won't tell you how many, but it's enough that I feel very confident that the interview helps me select really good staff.As you can see from these photos (below), Jeremy got out the camera one day to record one of my interviews (I think this one was with a staff assistant candidate). As you may know, our office is in my home, where Jeremy, Teri and I share a cozy little basement space. For interviews, I go upstairs with my headset and my notes and speak to the candidate by pre-arranged appointment.

The interview accomplishes at least two goals. First, it gives me a chance to complete my assessment of the applicant before making a hiring decision, as well as helping the applicant find out more about our camp. And second, for those who are hired, the interview becomes the first step in their orientation and training. Yes, we have a formal staff training week before camp starts, but the training really begins with our interview conversation. We start to develop our rapport and understanding of what it's like to work at our camp and within our philosophy.
Interview are serious business, but they are also great fun. Amazing people apply to work at camp and I enjoy learning more about their lives and accomplishments and answering their questions. If you think camp is great, then you can imagine that the people who would want to work at camp are pretty great too.In other blogs I'll tell you more about the hiring, screening and training process, and describe to you our "re-interviews" with returning staff.In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed our blizzard this week and that your vacation wasn't spoiled by a cancelled flight. In less than two weeks we have our leadership team coming in for a 3-day planning session and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we won't have this kind of weather to deal with.Our camp sundial (which sits on my front porch until we go back up to camp in June) looked pretty different this week compared to the summer. I took a couple of photos (see this blog on our website) before retreating inside to eat a few more homemade cookies and wait out the storm.To all you campers out there, I'm sorry this blizzard didn't make you miss school. Well, actually I'm not sorry because snow days can make school go longer and mess up the start of camp. So, truthfully, I was very happy this storm missed cancelling a school day. Sorry, kids.Enjoy the rest of your vacation week. Have fun. I'll talk to you soon.Tom

P.S. -- Don't forget that you can see even more photos on our blog by visiting our website: www.campuskids.com/newjersey.htm

 I actually have an "interview script" that I use to guide me through our conversations, though I admit that I often deviate because there are so many interesting things to talk about with the applicants.

 Jeremy got a wide shot here because he wanted you to know that there's a big fish that listens in on these interviews.  You should see the expression on people's faces when they come for an in-person interview and are sitting next to the big orange guy!


Friday, December 17, 2010

Generations of Camp

The 2011 season will be my eighth summer at camp. For some of you, you may be thinking “wow, that’s a long time” and others may say “that’s all?” I’ve been there since the beginning for some of you, and for others who read this blog, you may not even know who I am or have never met me in person. These ponderings have really inspired me – so much so that I have decided to make this a multi- blog series! The topic of these Blogs: generations of camp.

The first moment that this idea really hit me was at the Director’s Camp that Jeremy and I participated in over the first weekend in October. So for comparison, let me offer a description of an experience I had at (gasp!) another camp.

I want you to imagine where we were. It was at an all-boys camp in New Hampshire. Our main meeting space was a lodge, right on the water, with a beautiful porch outside. Inside, all the walls, floors, and ceilings were unfinished wood, making it really feel cozy and like a traditional but huge camp cabin. The lodge is a beautiful building that looks the same now as it did 100 years ago, which I realized because there are hundreds of framed pictures lining the walls, photos of the camp and it’s campers from the “old days” and some even of the lodge itself. I learned that the pictures were submitted by former campers throughout the various stages of their lives.

Some are of men dressed up in their finest clothes posing for their college portraits, others of a bunk group , or “cabins,” of boys with their counselors in their camp uniforms. Others are still shots of places around camp, and there are even paintings that campers had made of some of their favorite memories – skits and ceremonies being performed around the campfire, a canoe race. And there’s more – like a giant scrapbook of the camp, there are pennants of prestigious colleges, trophies and plaques from camp events, and all sorts of memorabilia. The campers who sent those things to Belknap obviously knew exactly where their items were going to end up – on the walls of the lodge.

Although the pictures were amazing to look at and helped me travel back in time to the earliest days of the camp more than a century ago, there was something else that struck me the most. Above all of these pictures, starting at about 5 feet off the ground, were a series of HUGE plaques, surrounding the room all the way up to the 20+foot ceiling. Made of wood and organized into neat columns, these wooden boards were painted in the camps colors: a nice pine-tree green with white writing. At the top of each column was a year, and below were listed the names of ALL THE CAMPERS who had reached their 5-year anniversary in that year. These large boards lined the walls with year after year of thousands of names, but there were some boards that had far less names on it.

These smaller boards were over the main door to the lodge, so you saw them every time you left the lodge. Here were the names of those who had spent 10 and 15 years of camp … and there was a much smaller section of the board with columns for people who had reached 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 and I think even up to 70 YEARS of returning to camp. These names represented folks who had grown up at camp, returned every year as counselors, and then got promotions as the years went on and even became the camp’s directors.

I’ll be honest. I left that weekend totally jealous of that lodge, of the history they had and the things that had been collected. It was like a giant time capsule. For weeks I tried to figure out ways that we could have portable boards, or collages and posters of memorabilia, or even keep Karly’s idea of a time capsule going for each and every summer. If they were portable, we could bring them to Blair with us in the summer and put them in storage when we weren’t at camp, or have some other way of preserving the number of years each camper had been with us.

I kept thinking about this for a while, about how we could adapt this tradition to fit our camp. Because we are so much “younger” and definitely smaller compared to the camp I visited (and other camps like it), we don’t have that many people who have been at camp for that long. And we would have to make a choice: backtrack and go through 20 years of paperwork to keep track of past campers and staff who’d reached the 5 or 10-year status, or start now but not include the history of those past CKNJ-ers. In either case, we could eventually generate a list of campers who came back for 5 years, or 10 years, what have you. To make that choice would be too hard, and I certainly don’t want to do either!

But that is when it hit me: this doesn’t fit us. That’s their awesome tradition. And I think that adapting their tradition would go against some parts of our philosophy – we’re a group of individuals and we respect that about every part of everyone in our CK family. Trying to plug in someone else’s tradition feels like smushing ourselves into a cookie-cutter and not acknowledging our individuality. Plus, it doesn’t matter how many weeks or years you’ve been at our camp. Each and every one of you is special to us, and you are part of our Campus Kids family, now and forever.

Instead, I started thinking of how we might classify the generations of CKNJ, in our own way. One of those ways is what my next blog is about: camp traditions. I hope you’ll “tune in” to read it in a few weeks. Until then, keep checking the blog and have a wonderful Winter Break!

Teri

Sunday, December 12, 2010

52 Pizzas, 40 Pitchers of Soda and 210 Pairs of Skates


Those are some of the statistics from last Sunday's camp reunion. And it's one reason that the Ice Vault likes hosting our party. Another reason, they tell us, is that we are such a "nice group", which I most definitely agree with.


This was one of the most fun reunions for me. Even though we've been doing them for a long time, we came up with some improvements for organizing things, which Teri outlined in a little job chart for the staff. The new system worked out really well and ended up leaving me with practically nothing to do! So I got to skate a lot and even eat a couple of slices of pizza and just enjoy seeing everyone. The only problem was that it's too hard to talk to every one of the 300 people or so who came to the reunion. But I tried!


We announced the bunk group theme for 2011: Outer Space. Now it's time for all campers to think up cool bunk group names that fit the theme. We'll put up a response form on our CK-NJ home page tomorrow so you can start submitting your ideas.


We also announced that Josh I. was the camper winner of our t-shirt photo contest and Donald C. won for the staff. They will be getting their embroidered CK fleeces soon! Check out all the photo entries.


I'm sure you've seen them already, but if not here's the link to all of our reunion photos. Thanks to Stu and Paul for taking them. If YOU have any you would let us share on this website, we'll create a reunion photo gallery just for you!


It was a busy week as we stepped up the pace of counselor hiring, now that we've got our leadership team in place and the staff assistant interviews are over. We also attended the annual ACA dinner (which we will tell you about in another blog) and Jeremy represented CK today at a camp fair at Ethical Culture School in Manhattan. There's lots on the calendar for this coming week, including a visit from Katrina!


Talk to you soon.
Tom

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Ready for the 20th Reunion

It's late for me to be up tonight, but I have a hard time sleeping the night before the camp reunion. It's too exciting thinking about all of our camp friends that we are going to see tomorrow. It's almost the same feeling I have the day before we move up to camp for the summer.



This year we celebrated our 20th summer camp season and tomorrow it's time for our 20th reunion. The first couple of years we had our reunion at camp -- up in Hackettstown -- and even used the swimming pool one year I think. But then attendance was too big to fit into the dining room and the drive was far for some families, so we started having it closer to where most of our campers lived. That's when we started using roller or ice rinks. They were big enough, could serve food, and they gave us something to do. But the skating is really not that important. Seeing people, talking and reminiscing, is the big deal at a camp reunion. I'm always amazed that friendships begin right where they left off in the summer and its seems like we were never apart. Of course, we hear that lots of campers have "mini-reunions" during the school year, so our official all-camp reunion is just one chance to see each other. And tonight I know of more than a few sleep-overs taking place as the campers and staff of CK-NJ get ready to converge on the Ice Vault tomorrow morning.


It looks like there will be about 350 people there tomorrow! It's always a bit strange seeing everyone in long pants and heavy coats and usually longer hair. And the ice rink is definitely colder than those summer days at camp.

Well, I'll be up really late, but you probably don't want me to write on this blog the whole time, so I'll find something else to do. In the meantime, you can enjoy the photos below that I found from our reunion archives. I think you will recognize a lot of these folks. Can you name them all?  (I've posted just a few of the pics.  You can see all of them at the blog page of our website: http://www.campuskids.com/njblog/campuskidsnjblog2010_12.htm

The van is packed with name tags, reunion gifts, our announcements sound system and now all I can do is wait. See you soon!

Tom

 

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

November Was Fun!

          Lots has happened in our camp world during November. We've enjoyed visits from many CK friends, announced our 2011 Leadership Team (we'll write about this later, but you can read about it now in the Nov.-Dec. issue of the "Sundial"), started interviews for staff assistants and counselors, attended some educational events, received many camper enrollments (yay!), and of course enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday. Before we turn the calendar to December, however, I'd like to share about two of these special days.

          I had extra help during one of our camp tours days. THREE staff assistants came out to help: Mandy, Caroline and Mitch. Tours are much more fun for me when I have such enthusiastic helpers, so it was a great day. Here's a photo of them with our youngest tour taker of the day. She may be short, but she had a lot of energy! Note that she's holding a classic CK-NJ folding disc: a collector's item. 
         








         
         This was the first time that Mitch, Mandy and Caroline had seen the new "pedestrian plaza" at Blair, which was completed after the end of our summer season, and they were pretty excited about that. They did some "practice socializing" in the Adirondack chairs on the new stone patio and demonstrated their camp enthusiasm with a jump off the wall. This newly renovated area of the Blair Academy campus will be really nice for camp, during canteen, evening shade and other activities.

          On Veterans Day, staff assistant Andrew invited us to an "organic dinner" to raise funds for the environmental club at Gov. Livingston H.S. in Berkeley Heights (he's the president). Teri, Jeremy, Vanessa and I ventured over with our plates, cups and forks (no waste!) and enjoyed a delicious, healthy meal. We were surprised by the absence of Frito pie, but really enjoyed the mixed berry-mango cobbler. Andrew did a great job organizing his club members, who worked very hard. They even washed our dishes before we left! 
But he did stop by our table to socialize.
We were honored -- the president himself!


No surprise to us, Andrew was on
the  move all night long. Busy guy!

Teri brought the nicest dinnerware of
the evening.  I won't show you mine,

but it definitely wasn't a matching set.

              It's been a great month and now we are just a few days away from our camp reunion! It looks like we'll have our usual 00 or so people for a fun few hours with our favorite people in the world. If you are a CK-NJ 2010 camper or staffer and haven't told us you're coming on Sunday (12/5), you've still got time if you hurry: http://www.campuskids.com/CKNJ_Reunion.htm.

          Finish up that last turkey sandwich and get ready for December. If we don't see you at the reunion, we'll see you on this blog when we open up the December page.

   Tom 

Friday, November 19, 2010

Mini Reunions

     I’ve had two visitors since I last wrote, and why is it blog-worthy? Well, both happen to be CK NJ-ers from years past!  Although they are no longer staff members, both of them have special places in Campus Kids history. And they have become great friends of mine as well!
The first visit was from Dave Morgan, who’s been everything at camp from a counselor, to the Day Trips & Special Activities coordinator, to Athletics & Evening Programs coordinator. Alright, enough with that “official stuff”… most importantly, you probably remember Dave as the lead guitarist and one of the Dave’s in “The Dave2 Experience,” and later “Dave2 and the Ste Amigos” – both functioning as the official CKNJ “house band” for our special events at camp. They played in the first four Campstock’s, and I am pretty sure helped to start our beginning of the summer music event, Rock of July! Dave has been a part of CK since 2005, and currently lives and works in the United States.
     Dave came down from Connecticut to visit us in NJ because his all-time favorite band, Muse, was playing at the Prudential Center in Newark. So we all got tickets to go – and what a show it was! If you like rock music and amazing vocals a-la Freddie Mercury of Queen, you should absolutely try to see Muse if you have the opportunity. They also had amazing lighting and set stuff going on – three platforms rising and lowering off the stage for each musician, a laser light show, and even some huge inflated eyeballs bouncing through the crowd! I got some pictures, but it just doesn’t do it justice!   
     Besides Muse, it was also great to catch up with an old friend, and we even scheduled an impromptu lunch with the 2010 Staff Assistants who live nearby. Dave had fun chatting with the Staffies, not just to reminisce about camp, but because some of them were his campers in 2005 and 2006 (members of “Tree Huggers Anonymous” and “Knights of the Roundtable”). “They’re all grown up!” he said to me on the ride back from lunch. It is amazing to look back at their old bunk group pictures and see how they’ve changed from chubby-cheeked campers to young adults that did amazing work this summer at camp.
     My second visitor was Jack Dinwiddy! Jack and I both started as counselors at CKNJ in 2003! Then, as the years went on, we got to be Head Counselors together for the older kids in camp in 2006! Needless to say, we’ve spent a lot of time together, and although now he is not a staff member of CK anymore, he is still working in the world of camp and has become one of my closest “colleagues” in the profession.
For this particular visit, Jack came over to the US with his girlfriend, Stacie, for her brother’s wedding in Georgia. So, they took the opportunity in the states to go on “holiday” – a vacation – and travel all over the Northeast catching up with camp friends from summer’s past. Jack and Stacie came by the office when they arrived in NJ and spent a few hours relaxing before Stu and Vanessa joined us for a special dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Yuki Hana, the Japanese restaurant in town. We had great food and conversation, and got a nice picture of us all, too (thanks to Stacie for being the photographer!). They then joined me in a quick car ride home and spent the night at our house. We talked for hours about camp and lots of other stuff too (but mostly camp!) and even though we thought we were boring Stacie and Jim, they both commented that it was cool to meet the people that their significant others have been talking about for years!   As quickly as they arrived, they were off to their next adventure; but it sure was great to see Jack in person instead of just emailing back and forth and chatting via Facebook.
     It was nice to have these little reunions with my camp friends. And it will be AWESOME to have our BIG camp reunion in just a couple of weeks! I can’t wait to see everybody and hear how life has been since camp ended. I hope you’ll join us if you can. You can RSVP to the reunion here if you haven’t done so already!


See you there!
Teri

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Photo Contest Update

I just wanted to remind everyone about our Official Wear Your Campus Kids T-Shirt In A Photo Contest is underway. I'm also here to announce that the entries sent in so far can be seen here. So far we have a pic from Matt Lurrie at the Great Wall of China. Okay, in his defense, we hadn't announced the contest before he left to go overseas so he got creative. We also have a photo of Mitch at the Washington Monument which shows off some pretty fancy camera work. Oh... and I snuck one in of me at Blizzcon next to someone dressed up as a Spirit Healer from World of Warcraft.

Remember -- we'll be picking one camper and one staff member to win a cool prize -- an embroidered CK-NJ fleece!


Send us your pics today! CKNewJersey@campuskids.com
See you soon,
~Jeremy

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Blizzcon, Website and Blogspot!

Well, I haven't blogged in about a month so I have quite a few things to tell you about. This might be a long one, so fill up your water bottle, grab a snack and find a comfortable chair.

First up is Blizzcon! As some of you might remember, my wife and I are enthusiasts for a certain video game you might have heard of, called World of Warcraft. The company that makes the game Blizzard has a convention every year called Blizzcon. Fans of all their games can gather once a year in Anaheim, California to demo new games, talk to the developers and get the inside scoop on upcoming updates to the games. Warcraft is a MMO game, which means Massively Multiplayer Online game and we play with a whole group of people. These groups are called guilds. Although we talk over the phone and the computer often, we used Blizzcon as an opportunity to meet 9 of our "guildies" in the flesh. We had a great time together at the con. Among the highlights was a trip to Medieval Times, Vanessa winning a WoW Soundblaster headset and the closing concert featuring the only band to ever play the definitive greatest song in the world, TENACIOUS D!

Another amazing thing that happened at Blizzcon was running into former long time CK-NJ camper Alexis C! Alexis attended CK-NJ from 1995 to 2001. That's seven unforgettable summers! She spotted me because I was wearing my official Campus Kids Tie Dye shirt. It was great to catch up with her and reconnect. We joked about the old days of CK and had a blast swapping Warcraft stories, too! All in all, it was a great trip and I'm glad I was able to go this year.

    In other news, there have been several updates to the website you should check out. First, there is our "Wear Your Campus Kids T-Shirt In A Photo Contest". All you have to do is wear your Campus Kids shirt in a photo. We expect great things from the contest. You can read the full details here. Second, the invitations to our 2010 Camp Reunion have gone out. You can read the info, get the directions and RSVP on this page. Also, I've added another video to the CampStock 5 page. We'll continue to add videos to that page throughout the winter!

    

The final piece of news this blog entry will deliver the introduction to the CK-New Jersey Blog on Blogspot! We will be posting all our entries now on campuskidsnewjersey.blogspot.com. We'll still be posting entries on the CK website, but on blogspot our readers can "follow" us and subscribe to the blog which will get them automatic notification anytime we update a new entry! Exciting times! Check it out!

Thanks for reading,

~Jeremy