Every year, about this time, a strange thing happens to my work/school. The season brings about stress, packages, long hours, free food and visitors.

It's ADMISSIONS time. =]
... and I'm in it right now.

The key aspect of this seasonal stressor is criticality.

First, hundreds of hopeful students send in portfolios of work, personal statements, CVs etc. to our office, where piles of them begin to accumulate. In the old days we had towering stacks of slide carousels (Exhibit A) but now we just get boxes full of envelopes, each with colorful CDs filled with JPGs and sometimes TIFFs, PDFs, GIFs and other wackiness.

After the applications are cataloged and uploaded (a process that produces pain in faculty, staff and student life through the rigors of extremely repetitive and boring tasks, misplacements of important files, discs containing virii, and general ignorance) it becomes time for the juicy part: jury selection.

At this point the relevant faculty for a given department cram themselves into a small, dank, unlit room for many hours at a time to scan through, quickly and often dismissively, the submitted images. The members of this process achieve a satisfying degradation of the less impressive work, but also inflict upon themselves the unpleasant process by organizing it to be arduous and burdensome.

It always amazes me how undesirable and yet necessary the process becomes, and how fierce the emotions flare, even over tiny things.

Wrong food? Wrong drinks? Yelling and screaming.
Not fast enough going to the next poor applicant? Technical glitch? Tempers risen and glares exchanged.

Although I may try to stay far away from this phenomenon I am rarely successful. I have attempted to smooth it out over time, to come up with safeguards, redundancy, and clever hacks. At the same time, I take pleasure in knowing that I don't have to endure days

...

spent underground

...

in the dark

...

looking at bad art.

=]