Hello From Outer Space

Hey everyone out there in CK Land!

It’s been a while since I posted to the blog. We’ve been busy getting ready for next summer. Teri and I are working with the leadership over the internet to plan for next summer. It occurred to me that you might not know what Teri and I do over the summer. Although we are both assistant directors, we each focus on different areas of camp.

Among the many things she does, Teri works closely with the head counselors. She helps them plan for bunk groups and trouble shoots any problems that might come up. One project they are working on right now it to come up with new ideas and activities for bunk meetings. She also co-leads the staff assistants with Tom. They have a bunk meeting every night, too! Teri also assists Sara in the prep for evening programs and special events.

For the most part, I just put my feet up and chill out all summer… heh heh. Actually, I do quite a lot. My main job is to help support the activity coordinators and help them organize the activities at camp. Right now, we are planning what new activities we will add to the selection this summer. In addition, I create the daily schedule at camp and that takes up more than a bit of my day. On top of that, I also help support the Team D staff assistants. Those are the amazing people who put up the pictures on the website, interview the counselors & staff, and write the photo journals about what is happening at camp.

Well, we’ve got lots to do so I’ll be signing off. Before I go though, I wanted to thank everyone who’s sent in suggestion for bunk group names. I’ve learned a lot about outer space from looking up the names you’ve sent in. I learned that Gliese 581 g is an unconfirmed extrasolar planet, orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581, 20.5 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Libra. It’s also considered the the planet outside our solar system with the greatest potential for harboring life! Did any of you know that the gaps in between the rings of Saturn are known as the Encke Division and the Cassini Division? Neat stuff, eh? Also, I want to remind everyone that you can help pick the bunk group names for this summer by clicking here. If you want to see the names sent in so far, click right here!

Talk to you again soon,

Jeremy

Snowy Tours

We give our camp tours year-round and this past weekend was a winter challenge. But several families came out to learn about camp and found out that it's a beautiful place in every season. Staff assistants Mandy and Mitch came along to help me. As former campers, they have a great perspective and did a fabulous job explaining CK-NJ and answering questions.


It takes just a little imagination to see the campus without snow, with lots of green grass and leaves and to believe that in just a few months we'll be running around in shorts and t-shirts. We get to to into the dorms, the dining room, the performing arts and fine arts buildings, the swimming pool, gyms, squash courts, fitness center and canteen, so that by the end of the tour it almost feels like summer camp.


Tours are one of the fun parts of our "off season" work at CK-NJ and we do them almost every weekend. Maybe we'll see you or your friends here soon! Just give us a call or an e-mail to set up your tour appointment.


Tom

The Ultimate Specialty

Campus Kids has a wide variety of activities -- sports & swimming, fine arts, performing arts -- that campers can choose from as they design their daily schedules. Each activity is lead by counselors who can teach skills so that our campers can learn new things and advance in their favorite activities.


We have one activity, though, that offers a special advanced program during one part of the summer: Weeks 5 & 6 (July 25 - August 5). It's our ULTIMATE FRISBEE SPECIALTY, which is lead by Ryan Belline and several other experienced ultimate coaches. This program doesn't replace our regular Frisbee activity at camp (which is wildly popular), but instead offers time to work on advanced skills and team strategies. Read all about it here. This is our second year offer this specialty and we expect that it will be very popular. If you want to join your local Ultimate team (or even start one), then you won't want to miss this special program.


Tom

Winter Beauty

Most people know that we give tours of camp to families who want to learn more about Campus Kids. But they sometimes don't realize that our tours take place year-round, including the middle of winter! Our campus, Blair Academy, is a beautiful place in every season, with winter showing off its blanket of white in a most appealing fashion. The roads and walkways are well-cleared so it's easy to see the campus and talk about our summer program. We see dorms, the pool, the athletic facilities, fine and performing arts centers, dining room and more.


I snapped these photos last weekend after our tours were finished:



 This sign stands out more clearly in the winter when the grove of trees behind it is without leaves.  Hardwick Hall has the swimming pool, squash courts, gymnasiums, fitness center, yoga room and canteen.  "Athletics" leads to the extensive grass and artificial turf fields, tennis courts, and the activities we set up just for camp: archery, fencing, skate park, ga-ga and gladiator.  The golf course is regulation with 9 holes.



 I know . . . this should be green and lush, maybe with the sprinklers spraying to cool us down.  And there should be some Frisbees flying across the lawn -- which we call "the bowl".  This is where we gather for the start of our activities, for our announcements and lots of all-camp activities, including campfires, Rock of July, CampStock, and evening shade.  At this time of year, though, it's used by the Blair families and students for sledding!  Oh, I almost forgot, those are two of our dorms across the way: Mason and Freeman. 

So you don't have to wait for the "nice" weather to come see camp. It's nice in every season. Give us a call or an e-mail to make your family's tour appointment on a winter weekend. See you at camp!

Tom

P.S. -- See more photos at the blog page of our website: http://www.campuskids.com/njblog/campuskidsnjblog2011_01.htm

It's a New Camp Year

At the turn of the new year as everyone was freezing, digging out of snow piles, and celebrating the start of 2011, Campus Kids-NJ was preparing for our official beginning of the new camp year: our annual Leadership Team Winter Retreat.

Our camp leadership team is made up of those staff members with camp-wide responsibilities who take time throughout the year to prepare for an amazing camp summer. This year we met on January 7-9 in Madison at the CK-NJ office (and Tom's home) for three very full days of planning (and fun, of course).


I always consider this planning retreat the official beginning of our new summer because it's the first gathering of next summer's staff members. The LT will continue its work via online Internet forums (yay for technology), and gather together again in early June. Our 14 members came from near and far: Mississippi, Colorado, Oklahoma, Maryland, way Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and of course New Jersey, and we were grateful to dodge the snowstorms that have so disrupted travel this winter.


I want to thank our wonderful team for their dedication and hard work. If you could have experienced the excitement of this group, you'd agree that Summer 2011 is going to be out of this world.

Tom

P.S. -- Here's Kim, Stu and Teri at our planning retreat.  We have lots more photos of that weekend on our website: http://www.campuskids.com/njblog/campuskidsnjblog2011_01.htm

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