The GIFtedness needed to be an Orientation Leader

On our team expedition, the Silverware went to the Build-A-Bear Workshop in the Menlo Park mall. Personally, I had only ever been to a Build-A-Bear workshop once before in my life and can scarcely recollect memories from that visit. This trip, in my eyes, was less about actually building a bear than it was about bonding as a team and observing qualities in the process and staff of build a bear that we could bring back with us to NSO for the summer. 

    

Now obviously, Build-A-Bear and NSO have differences to go along with their similarities. While one works with a predominantly younger customer base, the other works with incoming college freshmen. One strives to communicate the resources and opportunities available to Rutgers students and the other facilitates and assists the creation of a life long companion to the customers partaking in their business. Having already gone through one summer with NSO, some fundamental parallels were obvious to me as my group created our bears. 

[From this point onwards, there will be many “GIFs” used in my blog. For anyone not familiar with gifs, they are clips of movies, TV shows, cartoons that are set on loop. They are generally used to reference social issues on the internet, but I have used them to enhance my presentation. Simply click on the link where prompted to be taken to the gif]

Many of the similarities I noticed were concentrated around the customer-employee relationship in both organizations. Crucial to being an OL is the happiness and passion needed with interacting with first year students. With the long hours associated with working a two day session, exhaustion can take it’s tole as the summer presses on. No matter what kind of person you are, I can guarantee that at least one morning during the summer, you are going to wake up feeling too exhausted to go to Day 2 and might even feel like this when being woken up (http://i.imgur.com/7ZKHW.gif). With practice, you will understand the precautions you will individually need to make in order to arrive at work well rested and ready to do your job. Talking with the cashier with ringing up our bears, we discovered that this particular individual has worked at Build-A-Bear for close to eleven years. You think she never had a day where she just wanted to go back to bed instead of getting up and ready for work? 

Building off of my last point, it is important to always be enthusiastic during the summer. Even though you may be having a bad day, it is more important to make the session great for the student than it is for you to sulk and bring down your entire group. What is important to understand is that each student only has one orientation session that they go through. While the summer may at times seem like this (http://i.imgur.com/JdiG6.gif) to us, it is our duty not to snap out of that funk and instead react like this when we have our groups (http://i.imgur.com/zo7hy.gif). Likewise, the workers at Build-A-Bear consistently have to check their own behaviors so that a bad mood does not extend to the work space. If a Build-A-Bear worker is not excited when having the customers make their bears, than the whole process loses meaning and the person building a bear comes away from the experience unfulfilled. 

The opportunities that both NSO and Build-A-Bear have to impact the lives of those that participate in their activities are great and should not be squandered. The bears built at Build-A-Bear are unable to be replicated in any way because it is more than just the clothes and stuffing that goes into making a bear. Personally, I will always remember the wish that I made with my bear’s heart along with the actual process of building my bear. Those memories cannot be reproduced even by myself. Every time I look at my bear, I will remember the weird sounds Cole made when we were wishing on our hearts and Virginia’s penguin and Avey’s camo bear. What Build-A-Bear did, and continues to do, is to take a simple process and make it into something so much more. NSO too can do this and does do this. We could simply put the incoming first years through information session after information session with little interaction with their peers and the OLs having an almost non-existent role. Instead, we work to create an environment of acceptance where many issues relevant to students can be discussed without judgement and new bonds can form between OLs, students and Rutgers as a whole. From my experiences, many students come into Rutgers thinking of it as a less than stellar accomplishment (http://i.imgur.com/eL5sQ.gif). By the end of the sessions, the general consensus of the students as they re-looked at Rutgers was one of excitement and pride (http://i.imgur.com/URtcF.gif). This new image of Rutgers is fueled by the awesome Orientation Leaders who also gain a new image in the eyes of the students by the end of the session (http://i.imgur.com/k9X8b.gif).