Back At It!
The Daily Deac took a little break last week for some family vacation to Yellowstone National Park with Class of ’27 Deac and Deac Dad. For all our Deac families in those areas, my hat is off to you. What an absolutely stunning place to live. So very different from Winston-Salem.
You might think summer is a time of slowness and rest at the University, but you could not be more wrong. Summer is the time when we collectively do a lot of physical work for the coming year – maintenance or renovation of residence halls, retiring of old furniture and bringing in new, and anything that might be painting, paving, pruning, plumbing or any of the other things.
Summer also brings a slew of visitors to campus who are here for camps and conferences. In addition to the summer school students who are living on campus, we use our residence halls to host paid camps over the summer. Campers could be little kid daycampers – like my ’27 Deac who is here for a sports camp – or it could be overnight guests. You can see a list of the conference groups here. It makes for a lot of activity on campus when you see a big gaggle of camp folks all going across the Quad or the fields at once. The ones that are really fun are the cheer/dance teams – they can get really loud when they do their start-of-the-day cheers!
In terms of the Parent Programs office, summer is one of our very busiest times. We are in the midst of organizing about 30 New Student Receptions for the incoming first-year students and families. These receptions help our newest Wake Foresters meet each other, and help build a network and some shared ties between the new students and parents and some current ones.
If you are a parent or family member of an incoming first-year Class of 2018 student, please sign up for one of these receptions if you wish. We send invitations directly to your students (because we have their email addresses now, and not all new parents have completed their Parent Record Form – good reminder to do so if you have not!) Note that your student does not have to receive an email invitation to attend. All are welcome. We only send to a reasonable driving distance from each reception because we don’t want anyone to feel like these are command performances or make anyone feel obliged to attend.
If you are the parent or family member of an upperclassmen, you could be a big help to us too! We are always in need of a few current students at these receptions. If there is one in your area and your rising sophomore, junior, or senior will be in town, please share this post with them and ask them to sign up! We want to have some current students present at our receptions to help answer questions that the new families have! Or if you want to attend as an upperclassmen parent, we welcome you!
Finally, in taking a look at campus via the Quad Cam, it can show you how green and lovely it is this week, but can’t show you that the heat of Southern Summer is coming. The Weather Channel tells us that it will be in the low 90s this week. Time for our summer school students to get out their most lightweight clothes and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.