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This past week has been interesting.

First, I was asked to help produce part of the online orientation program. That sentence including “online orientation” itself is interesting, but what I want to focus on was that I was asked to help out with the production. I ended up having to run a soundboard. I haven’t touched one of those in probably 15 years. A lot has changed – there are more touchscreens and less dials than I remember.

Second, I have been working on editing some audio for this podcast and some video for another project. My laptop wasn’t cutting. So, I pulled out my desktop and started tinkering. I haven’t used the desktop much in a while. It had been relegated to mostly running to be a place to backup data automatically. I almost said, “quietly running”, but it most certainly wasn’t running quietly. The loud fan and messing with some of operating system rekindled my inner IT guy.

It wasn’t the technical stuff that got me excited – it was the problem solving. Having to figure out the sound board. Deciphering a computer boot issue. It was fun to experience a problem, identify the source and troubleshooting my various attempts at solutions. It was nice to work in the world where the problems can either be solved or not. I knew when it was working the way I wanted it to and could predict it would continue that way.

When people ask me if I miss IT when I’m in admissions. Sometimes, the only answer I give is that when I was in IT, I knew when things weren’t working and that there were solutions out there. Admissions and recruitment is more art than science and sometimes you don’t always have confirmation that things are going well.

The running of the sound board went flawlessly and my desktop computer has more memory and a quieter fan. That made this interesting week succesful in my own eyes.

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That’s not how it started. No, that’s where we ended up, but that’s not how it all began.

Mat and I spend lots of time thinking about our profession – college/university admissions. It’s not just a job, this is a profession and it almost borderlines on obsession. The thrill of seeing a student identify a path and actually make it a reality is the stuff that keeps us going. Watching students graduate (or not). Seeing them succeed in ways we couldn’t have imagined perhaps many years before as a teenager in a high school gymnasium at a fair. It’s what we’re made of.

We realized quickly that we are also not the source of all knowledge. We talk to lots of our colleagues all over the world. That brings a variety of opinions, thoughts and observations together in a way that also keeps us thinking about what we’re doing now and what we’re going to do in the future.

That’s when it hit us – a podcast. Not because we know it all and want to pass that on. We want to hear from those around higher ed and even outside the industry to learn from them and then pass that on. We want to see Post-Secondary Education succeed and we hope this helps.

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