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!



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

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

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