May 2008
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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Coming to you live!  It’s 2005!

This week we learned what it’s like to lose something important that you take for granted.

The Campus Kids website is a very hands-on project that Jeremy and I spend a lot of time on.  It’s become a very important way to keep in touch with our camp community.  And it’s the main communications vehicle for our staff, campers, parents and folks who are just finding out about our camps.

So when we realized late last Tuesday night that the website was down, we were concerned.  It got worse when we found out that our web hosting company had a fire that destroyed most of their backup power systems, causing failure of all the websites they host.

So here we were at the very busiest time of our year without our website.  But it got worse.  For some as yet unexplained reason, on Wednesday our site returned as it appeared on November 14, 2005!  What was going on?

So we put in many calls to the service provider, who didn’t want to speak to anyone because they were literally putting out fires and rebuilding power systems.  We eventually found, to our horror, that they inadvertently started the wrong backup tape and that we would be stuck with this back-to-the-future version of our site until the whole company-wide problem was fixed.

What a blow!  We felt completely cut off from our world and it ended up being a pretty terrible week as more and more people who use our website were confused and upset.  It made us look really bad and we knew just how bad when a long-time CK mom told us that she thought we had “gone out of business”.  Yikes!

Finally, early Friday evening, the current version of our website was restored and we could begin dealing with the ramifications and try to get back to normal (and we could finally get a good night’s sleep).  Suffice it to say that this problem has created a lot of extra work for us.

As we get ourselves back on track in the office and rush to complete preparations for our move up to camp next Wednesday, we definitely know that we’ll never underestimate the importance of our website.  And, when we can catch our breath after this busy start-up of the camp season, we’ll be looking for a new web hosting service.  In the meantime, if you need any help finding one for yourself, we’ll be glad to tell you about one that you should NOT use.  (Hint: it starts with “Value”, ends with “Web”, and has no letters in between.)

Thank goodness it’s almost camp time, the best time of the year!

Tom

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Our International Staff

Many people ask us how we get those terrific staff from other countries, known in camp as “the internationals”.

Well, unfortunately, Jeremy and I don’t get to fly all around the world looking for these wonderful people.  Somebody else does that for us, namely the authorized agencies who specialize in international camp counselor programs.  The U.S. State Department allows a certain number of non-U.S. citizens to enter this country with a J-1 Visa that specifically allows them to work as camp counselors in the U.S.  You may not realize that summer camp is a very American institution and, though there are camps in other countries, there is no other country that has the huge number of camps that we do.

We have selected two of the international camp staff agencies to be our representatives around the world.  They have offices in many countries, which recruit candidates and collect their applications, references, background checks, interview transcripts, etc.  The Campus Kids liaison at each agency looks through many hundreds of applications and presents to us the ones they think look best for our camp.  We then review each application and, if we like what we see (which isn’t always the case) we set up a phone interview with the applicant.

It can be tricky setting up an interview across time zones.  Sometimes I am interviewing an applicant when it’s Monday here and it’s already Tuesday afternoon there!  But we work it out and manage to have a good long talk to make sure that both the applicant and me agree that this would be a good match.

If we decide to offer the person a job then, after much cheering on their part, they get busy completing their visa paperwork, finalizing travel plans with their agency, and reading all about being a staff member at Campus Kids-NJ (on or website).

It’s a very exciting time that culminates in arrival day for the new counselors when we finally get to meet all the internationals in person, as well as our American counselors who have traveled in from all parts of the U.S.

Tom

Monday, May 19, 2008

Wilderness First Aid

As many of you already know, Ryan and I co-lead the Weekend Adventure program at CK-NJ.  If you know that, you probably also know that my wife, Vanessa, is also a big part of our program.  Safety is always big concern on Weekend Adventure.  One of the things we do to be prepared for whatever the adventure brings us is get some training in wilderness first aid.  Every two years we take a course taught by an organization called Solo, who are experts in wilderness medicine.  You can read about the course from the Solo website here.  It involves how to deal with common medical issues and potential problems when you are out in the woods and possibly more than an hour from emergency medical care. 

We learn how to do first aid and treat injuries in less than ideal conditions and how to improvise when you don't have a fully stocked health center at your disposal.  The course covered dealing with everything from insect bites, to broken bones, to sprains, to weather related issues like hypothermia and heat exhaustion. We learned the proper methods of moving injured people to safety and how to treat them.  Most of the exercises in the course were set up as scenarios where your team would find an injured person and have to determine what was wrong and what was the appropriate and best treatment you could give in a wilderness setting.  Some of the scenarios involved finding unconscious injured people and others involved finding conscious victims who had one or more serious conditions to deal with.

Solo's WFA course is a weekend long program.  We went out to the Appalachian Mountain Club's Camp Mohican in Blairstown, NJ.  It was a lot of fun.  We stayed in a very Weekend Adventure-like cabin.  The food was pretty good and the guys who ran the camp hosted a music night on Saturday.    They had put together a 3 piece band and played lots of classic rock songs that everyone loved and sang along to. 

We had a lot of fun.  It's also feels good to be so prepared for maintaining safety and being able to take care of all the campers on Weekend Adventure.  By the way there are still spots available for all the weekend adventures and you can get the information from our website here.

See you soon!
Jeremy

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Time to make the Sundial

So the Staples guys dropped off a big box of paper.  This can mean only one thing!  It's time to print the Sundial.  Although it's available for reading online, campers and families still love getting their paper copy of the Sundial in the mail.  So... staff assistants, get to work! 

Actually, there are no staff assistants during the "off season".  So Tom's given me a temporary promotion from assistant director to staff assistant! In all seriousness, a lot of work goes into the Sundial.  First, we have have to collect and edit all the staff entries.  Then it's time to write up all the camper introductions (thanks to all who've sent in their welcome forms to tell us about yourself).  When I'm all done with layout, I send it over to Tom who does the final check for spelling and typos.  Then it goes up to website and the printing frenzy begins.

For those of you who've never seen it, we  use a big duplicating machine called a Risograph to make all the copies (that is, if Sara hasn't broken it).  After all the copies are printed, the real fun begins!  It's time to collate & staple!  Each run of the Sundial is 650 copies.  This issue was 8 pages long so printed out on 4 pieces of paper.   That's a grand total of 2600 pieces of paper and 1300 staples (one in the corner and one at the bottom after it's folded in half). 

After a quick and easy trip through the postage machine, the Sundial gets dropped off at the Madison post office.  The postal workers assure us that the Sundial is their top priority and that our campers will get their copies in the next day or so! 

I can't wait to see you all at camp where there's plenty of professional staff assistants to do this work!  Just a few more weeks!

Jeremy

May 2008
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