I'm in the office today, as we started resident assistant training yesterday. After a full summer of only working four days, I'm now starting a stretch that'll see me work every day until, I think, September 7.

It's an interesting time of year for people in student affairs (and education in general), one where routine is disrupted and the comforts of home are traded in for office furniture and much steadier diet of junk food than one really needs.

I will say that the RA training and opening period here is much less stressful than when I worked at BU. Here at Babson, we're training 38 RAs, usually end by 5 pm, and have our largest move in day on Labor Day, when we'll welcome about 415 first year students to campus. At BU, we trained almost 300 RAs (about 50 in my area), often went from 8 am to 8 pm (or later), and moving in 415 people in a day isn't even remarkable.

Even with the more human scale, there are still aspects of training and move in that never go away. Rooms that aren't ready when the student arrives. RAs who are perhaps not as attentive as one would like. And so on.

I had more to say about this, but I've been working on a couple of other things over the afternoon, and those original thoughts I had are gone. Which, when it comes down to it, is another common problem during this time of year.