Hours: 8:00am - 12:00pm

Had a one on one meeting with Trish - she loved the idea of toolboxes for the OL's. We ordered the fun stuff from orientation trading and will use the materials as a welcome activity for the OLs. Went over Saturday of Service details: how will be include commuter students in evaluations if we're not feeding them (send them a google doc or survey monkey survey later). not signed on to that yet. I need to be convinced a survey will replace a "reflection activity" sufficiently. Took a campus tour. Learned some new things about BSC, e.g. "Buffalo State is 99% wireless" and "there are 150 computer labs on campus."

As a student ambassador, I would get pretty nervous when staff members were on my tour, and I guess i was right to be nervous. I also understand the value of taking a campus tour once year as a staff member in student affairs. This is the campus marketing - they shoul dhave the mos tup to date information about the campus, and if the tour guides are giving out incorrect information, it needs to stop. And if i were to give feedback to the dean, it's not a poor reflection on the individual student giving the tour, it's just feedback about the information on the tour. I would hope that the hiring process for tour guides is enough to weed out people that don't like attending school or know how to properly promote the campus.

Literature indicates that reflection components to service activities increase the value of the service experience exponentially. I'm not looking to intimidate new students or make the experience more academic than it is intended to be, but i think it will be much more successful if they interact with the service experience a little bit more than going to point B, clean up, have a snack, clean up some more, and go home. And I'm learning now that students won't reflect on their own; they need to be poked an prodded. I really appreciate the resource that Americorps as put together to help structure reflection activities properly and effectively (http://www.studentsinservicetoamerica.org/tools_resources/docs/nwtoolkit.pdf). We used part of it this past April for Community Service Day, and I'll continue to use it in the future, along with Edward Zlotkowski's Journal "rubric". Also, Portland State is well known for its volunteer and service-learning initiatives. They are a good model to follow.