For those of you who are new here, I work at a university in the marketing department. It’ll be a year in October, and I love it. This post is coming to life because of a post Bill over at A Silly Place had written earlier this month where he commented, “It must be weird working on a college campus during the summer.”

I can definitely say, after working my first summer on campus, it is weird.

April and May are both busy months on campus—April is full of end of the year events, while May brings senior week and commencement weekend—so once June hit, we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Leading up to summer, people would ask me if I had to work or if I had the summer off. It’s a reasonable question to ask, but no, I don’t have summers off. Faculty, for the most part I guess if they’re not working on projects on campus, are probably home for the summer. (If they’re doing any teaching, it’d be for online classes or on-campus summer classes that meet at night.)

It’s weird to look out onto campus and not see tons of students walking around, but you get used to it. Our student-workers are also gone, so it’s overall quieter in the office. And to be honest, a lot of people take vacations. It’s kind of hard to during the school year, and I think I’m one of two people in my office that didn’t take a week off. (I’m really bad at using my vacation time. I did take two days off in August to make a four day weekend.)

Summer orientations for the incoming first year students began in the end of June and went into July, so the orientation leaders were on campus early June, and then during the sessions, there were students and families on campus. I went out for the sessions to take pictures for social media, and leading up to and during the orientations, I helped with updating the website with registration links, schedules, etc.

That’s really the big highlight of the summer and where most of our work goes toward. There are also summer camps going on over in athletics for young kids. And there are still tours, so you normally see either families or groups on tours on campus.

For me, personally, the summer was time to work on projects I didn’t get to during the school year. I created a few campaigns on social media to keep our platforms active over the summer and helped put the digital version of our university magazine on the website.

Now we’re back into the swing of things. Fall athletes started moving in in the middle of the month, freshmen move-in day was Friday, and the rest of the students moved in Saturday/Sunday. Today was Convocation, which normally was on the day of freshmen move-in, but it was moved to the first day of classes for this year.

I was out running around Friday and today, and I’m so glad the big events are done for a little while.

So yeah, long story short—I still have work during the summer. We do have summer hours—we get out at 4:00 p.m. instead of 4:30 p.m., which is really nice and horrible when we have to switch back to 4:30 p.m. (That was last week. It was rough for all of us.)

It’s nice to have the students back, especially our student-workers in the department. And it’s fun to go to different events during the week on campus. I’m definitely glad I ended up back at the university.