Pizza Party Craziness

We have had three pizza parties with the philosophy graduate students within the past week and a half as part of our efforts to host the prospective students who are visiting the school. The philosophy department accepted a number of students to start the graduate program in the fall and offered all of those students the opportunity to come to the school to meet the faculty and students and attend classes for a couple days before they have to decide if they will accept the offer to come in the fall. Joshua was part of the committee that was responsible for hosting the visiting students and this year there where eight who decided to visit, which is a lot. I think last year there were four. He was working with another student to find current students who were willing to host the visitors, give rides to and from the airport, take them to dinner, take them to campus in the mornings, meet for coffee breaks, and give tours of the campus. With eight students visiting, it ended up being a lot of work. They not only had to find people who were available, but also tried to match them up with visitors who had similar interests, plus some other logistical details. It involved a lot of emails. All of this came during the last three weeks of classes when things are crazy anyway, so this term has been one of the most challenging since we have been here. But I think things went well and the visitors seemed to have good experiences.

 As I mentioned, we had department pizza parties with the visitors and I got to be part of those. It was fun to get to meet new people, hang out with friends from the department, and eat free pizza, but having three so close together was a lot and two of them didn't start until 9pm, which is pretty late for us. Needless to say, there have been lots of good things about the past few weeks and Joshua and his fellow committee member did a great job, but we were relieved when the final visitors left yesterday.