Experience UGA
Athens, Georgia (and on Zoom), October 2019-May 2021.
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Can a job, even a short-lived one, feel like home? I know, from experience (no pun intended), that it can.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the arrival of fall brings back deep-seated, almost biological memories of back to school. The excitement (and sometimes dread) of being back on a campus, or starting anew, minds open and fresh and ready to learn. There’s just something in the air on a college campus at the beginning of the fall semester, and no matter whether it’s still sweltering out or when half the leaves are already on the ground, the feelings are the same. Hope. Promise. The thrill of knowledge and endless possibilities, just waiting to be discovered.
That feeling is why I loved being a student, and, later, why I always wanted to work full-time on a college campus. That opportunity came in September 2019. But I had to get there first.
If you’ve ever moved (and most of us have), you know how time-consuming and overwhelming it can be to “settle in” to a new city. Even if your housing is already good to go, you’ve got doctors to find, schools and child cares to vet, grocery stores to learn the layout of, drivers’ licenses and car registrations (NO THANK YOU, Georgia’s Ad Valorem Tax), multiply all of that by the number of people in your family, and throw in searching for a new job, learning the new job with basically no time off in between, finding a better job, and trying to make friends and find fun things to do—that’s just a snapshot of what adulting looked like for the first six months in Athens, Georgia in late 2019 and early 2020. (And I wrote about the next six months here).
But there were things I did get during those early months in a new place: Coffee with a few new friends, and reunions with a few old ones. Access to a smattering of concerts and sports events. A tethered hot air balloon ride with a terrified 3-year-old on the hottest day in what passes as “Autumn” in the South. The promise of seeing old friends on short day trips or long weekends. Holidays back in my old hometown. Visits to my grandmother.
And while the climate was an all too familiar reminder of the decades I spent growing up in neighboring South Carolina—one wouldn’t call the temperatures “polite”—there was something comforting in that, too. Even if that meant a triple digit day at the start of October and humidity for miles. It felt familiar, in the way that the smells of the old homestead feel familiar, if not quite comfortable. I recognized that feeling, and it dug up pieces of the past I hadn’t even realized were buried.
I was jobless when we arrived, but it only took a month for me to land a part-time position at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia (UGA). I was the Program Coordinator for IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales) a doctoral-level program, full of brilliant students studying how varying infectious diseases intersect with any number of biological, chemical, or anthropological factors.
I met with students to make sure they were taking the required classes. I organized a Science Communications Training with the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. I made a poster (not this one, but like this one).
(I went to the website recently and can still see the updates I made when I was there five years ago! Like how one student’s picture is smaller than the rest. I couldn’t figure out how to format that for the life of me).
It was mildly exciting to be a part of this environment, but it did not include health insurance, so I had to work and continue job-searching at the same time. Just a little more than a month later, I left the IDEAS Program and accepted a position with the UGA Office of Service-Learning as the Program Coordinator for Experience UGA.
Here’s the pitch: Experience UGA is the only program of its kind in the nation (this is still true!), with hopes of eventually bringing all 14,000 public school students in Athens-Clarke County, PreK-12th grade, to the university for a unique field trip every year. (The number currently stands at about 10,000 coming to campus). Students are exposed to a wide variety of schools, colleges, majors, and departments and are given the opportunity to explore future pursuits, but also to connect what they are learning in the classroom right now to the resources available to them at a world-class institution of higher learning.
It’s a win for the students and teachers, because it gives them targeted opportunities to connect with resources not just for the future but in the present. And it’s certainly a win for UGA, giving the university a sea of students who come onto campus each year, dreaming of attending. It also helps to soften the barrier between “Town and Gown”, although there’s always more to be done on that front (and that topic is way beyond my expertise to address).
As the Program Coordinator, my job was huge. Tons of communication between hundreds of individual teachers, principals, and staff on the district side. And on the university side, tons of communication between professors, student volunteers, campus groups, and staff. “Coordinator” was accurate, but was lacking in what that fully entailed.
I started my job in late October 2019. I had my own office in our Office of Service-Learning, inside an old house that reminded me a lot of my childhood home, a building with creaky floors and sneaky cockroaches, but my windows looked out over the little yard and the half-dozen feral cats who lived in the woods nearby. Plenty of birds, usually cardinals, stopped by the little tree by my window. It was the first time in 15 years that I had my very own space.
My supervisor, Josh, and I got along great. Our journeys, inhabiting the same far-flung states of Arizona and Vermont at the same time, our paths not crossing until Georgia; the universe had clearly been conspiring to make us friends. Which made the supervisor-supervisee relationship a little awkward at times (how much can one joke around with their supervisor, who they’ve known for just a couple of months?), but made working together such fun. He was honest about the challenges and limitations of the position, but also the rewards. He was supportive but not pushy—he had plenty of his own work on his hands. And our kids were practically the same age, so he could very much relate to the same struggles I was going through with my 3-year-old.
The Office of Service-Learning felt like I still worked at a nonprofit instead of a huge university, which was a nice intersection of my interests and experiences. The director and other staff were kind and hardworking and realistic about what it meant to toe the line between making a difference, with all the resources UGA afforded to us; yet we were not anywhere close to the “top tier” of departments on campus, so we were always making do with what we could.
In my role, I supervised a graduate assistant, a student worker, a student scholar, a dozen student volunteer Ambassadors, and later, an AmeriCorps service member, so I got to keep working with college students, as I had for many years already. It was a huge responsibility and not a lot of compensation, but for all of that, it was exactly what I needed to be doing.
On my very first day, I walked miles all over campus on an Office of Admissions tour with a bunch of sixth graders (one of them asked me, “Why are you following us?”) as they explored the aforementioned Grady College and the Ethnobotanical Garden. I got to tag along for the Pre-K trip to the State Botanical Garden, with first graders to the College of Pharmacy learning how to avoid poisonous substances at home (“Is it medicine or is it candy?” was a popular game, and harder to guess than you might think). Third graders were treated to an original play, written and performed by the UGA Children’s Theatre troupe, and seventh graders visited the UGA Trial Gardens (more gardens)! And I observed high school seniors play financial planning games from the Fanning Institute and learn about post-high school opportunities from students and staff at the Career Center.
This is just a snapshot of a few of the trips we offered. Each one was carefully planned and curated, and I knew I would be learning a lot from each of them. I was also excited that my own daughter would have the chance to start attending them when Pre-K began in the fall of 2020.
The fourth graders got to visit Stegeman Coliseum, where basketball games are played (and hosted the 1996 Olympics!), and see architectural engineering in action with the high, domed ceilings and the trusses holding up the roof. The kids were tasked in building their own spaghetti towers and catapults, led by staff and students at the College of Engineering.
Because of the enormous task of bringing thousands of students to campus (don’t get me started on what it takes to organize buses), there was a series of days where we welcomed students from two different schools at once, and with a total of 14 elementary schools, that was 7 different days, spread out over the month of February (surrounding National Engineering Week) where hundreds of kids and their teachers flocked to the building.
On one of the trips, we needed to kill some time before we moved to our next activity, and the kids were getting restless. Remembering an activity an Ambassador had led at the previous trip, I stood up, and in my best camp director voice, said, “If you can hear me, clap once!”
A smattering of claps echoed through the group.
“If you can hear me, clap twice!” (more clapping, less talking) “If you can hear me, clap three times!” (even more clapping, even less talking). Then I was ready.
“We’re going to make it ‘rain’ inside today,” I told them. I showed them how to quietly rub/swish their hands together in unison, then snap their fingers, then clap, then slap their knees, and finally stomp their feet as I ran back and forth, conducting the choir like I was doing the wave. After they had revolved back down to slapping, clapping, snapping, and then swishing, everyone was calm and quiet and ready to listen to the directions for the next activity.
There is something really rewarding about commanding the attention of a hundred 9- and 10-year-olds, in an echoey, open space, no less, and doing it well.
Afterwards, one of the teachers approached me. He was a little older than I was, tall and skinny with a friendly but not-quite-detached demeanor. He asked me about myself and somehow the conversation flowed to me mentioning that I’d been to Montreal. “Canada is a great place to visit; I’ve been there many times,” he said.
Later that day, I found out that I’d just met the former drummer for Counting Crows, who’d retired from the band and had been teaching elementary school for many years. I’m sure his 4th grade students had no idea about the exciting previous life their teacher had had!
March 2020 arrived. My last field trip (though I didn’t know it at the time) involved spiriting 100 high school sophomores around the College of Environment and Design. They built balloon towers and learned about how math, art, and architecture come together in beautiful, efficient landscape designs.
I had gotten sick over the weekend (at my dad and stepmom’s wedding), and was coughing like crazy and stealing away to the bathroom every few minutes to blow my nose. The trip went well, but was super draining. After the trip, I’d left our walkie talkies, clipboards, and a bunch of clementines in the Experience UGA folding wagon in a closet. I needed to go home and rest, so I planned to pick them up during spring break, the following week, when I was feeling better and campus was less hectic.
Little did I know that by the end of spring break, we were banned from entering any university buildings. I cringe to think about what happened when they finally opened that closet, months later, and retrieved the (gulp) clementines. Whole trees could have sprouted by that point.
I already wrote about the between-time (or was it the upside-down?) in my essay about my neighborhood, Rocky Drive, but the through-line is that though my job didn’t exactly stop, it didn’t keep going, either. We were at a perplexing standstill. During a pandemic, what do you do about a program that brings hundreds of school students and college students together inside buildings on a college campus?
I dreaded the phrase that so many of us had to endure in Spring 2020: We must go remote. My mind protested: but I took this job specifically to work on a college campus! So I could absorb all that inspiration and knowledge that is just in the air on the quad. So I could drive through historic downtown Athens on still mornings, pay hundreds of dollars to park my car in lot A-42 or whatever it was, walk for ages across the quiet campus as the day was warming up, and clip-clop over the hardwood floors in my office before heading out on a field trip or sitting down at my computer.
I did not want to have to learn the new tech skills that remote work required, although, like many of us, I found that it obviously wasn’t as challenging or even as miserable as I thought it would be.
Our virtual content site is still up and running, if a bit locked in time, but it’s well worth checking out if you want to learn about our Pre-K through Eighth Grade trips: experienceugavirtual.uga.edu
We partnered with many of the UGA colleges we already worked with, like the Mary Frances Early College of Education and the UGA Botanical Garden, who created content for our virtual field trips. It was partially to continue the program in the best way we could, but also to show UGA leadership that we were still relevant, that an enormous in-person program like ours shouldn’t be cut because of a measly pandemic.
In the middle of all this was when we decided to move. (I had to weigh the sad possibility that my job as I knew it might evaporate anyway, so what did I have to lose)? Fortunately, the program and the position was more secure than I had thought, and Shannon, my director, gave me the opportunity to telecommute.
So for the next ten months, I continued to work for the University of Georgia, 3,000 miles away, using my university-issued computer at my desk in a borrowed house at the tip of an island in Washington State.
It would always be temporary, at least until I found something local, or when field trips started back up in person again, whichever came first. But, during that time, I found that it was a surprisingly familiar and comforting aspect of this whole new place and new life—three time zones over, touching a different ocean—that I had chosen to dive headfirst into. Even though I’d only been in the job for ten months when we left, keeping this one thing the same was a kind of home when everything else was new.
I was physically in one place and virtually in another. People do it all the time, working remotely for companies across the world, and isn’t it just so strange? Or is it just how it is?
Sometimes the homesickness took over, and how odd it was, to be homesick for something I’d barely scratched the surface of.
But mostly, I still had my Experience UGA team, and they had me. Josh, of course, and Peter (Graduate Assistant), Isabelle (student worker), Suvitha (Student Scholar), the whole Service-Learning staff, plus a dozen new Ambassadors I virtually supervised, and, best of all, Olivia, our new AmeriCorps member. (Olivia, plus Isabelle and Suvitha, created most of the templates for our virtual site, and is going to be utterly embarrassed that I’ve linked all her work here).
We hired her over Zoom, we talked over email, and I never met her in person. Even though there’s an age gap of 20 years between us, she became one of my favorite people over the course of the almost-year we worked together. We could have been best friends! (Why haven’t you visited me in Washington, yet, Olivia)?
I’ve been lucky; I’ve had a lot of incredible, dream jobs over my professional career, and I’m happy where I am now (more on all of it at some point). But I miss my Experience UGA job a lot. I miss the specifics of it all, as hard as it was to organize and coordinate, as blindly optimistic everyone was about the kind of results it would garner, as overwhelming as it all was.
Some days, I still wish I was there, doing that work.
I know that the program is going along swimmingly without me. The “new” coordinator has been there for several years and I know she’s rocking it, and students who want to volunteer or work with the program continue to flood in every semester. Josh is kicking it into high gear like he does with everything, with field trips increasing each year as the team learns and improves upon what is now over a decade of running this program. And the Office of Service-Learning continues to set the bar high for other universities wanting to emulate Experience UGA, although I have yet to hear of anyone else coming close.
But with such an abrupt ending due to the pandemic and then to a cross-country move, I’ve had to come to terms with things feeling undone and incomplete. With the fact that I didn’t get even close to finishing what I started. With the fact that I didn’t get to see any of those students again. With the fact that in March of 2020, on the last day before spring break, one of the student workers I supervised told me that she was going home to Atlanta and would be staying inside and washing her hands, and I laughed at her. Yikes.
And that I left those clementines in that closet, surely moldy and mushy, for someone else to clean up. Oops!
Hey Josh, you guys cleaned those up, right? Right?!
Reflection questions:
Have you had a job that felt like home before? What made it feel that way?
Have you had to leave something unfinished that you felt strongly about? How did that make you feel a year later? Five years later?
The University of Georgia is located in present day Clarke County, Georgia, on the land of the Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East), S’atsoyaha (Yuchi), and Mvskoke (Muscogee/Creek) nations.
Image: Experience UGA logo.