At School Over the Summer

When the semester ended, only about 60 students stayed on campus over the summer.  I was staying there to do my internship, and continued working at ISS to qualify to live in the dorms.  J stayed to work on her biology research project, and worked in the business office to earn her spot in the dorms.  Alex went home and while he only lived 30 minutes away, he was hardly heard from.  A week or two into summer, he broke up with J over the phone, and that was that.  He had only been interested in using her for his own purposes, in extremely selfish ways, and he was done with her.

Both J and I had gotten cars from our families at the beginning of the summer, but were used to staying on campus all the time, so we saw each other a lot.  My internship basically fell through before it even started, after being delayed a few weeks into the summer.  They ended up hiring another student who had just graduated, because he planned to stay there, instead of returning to school at the end of the summer.  The teacher who introduced me to that company had originally had a talk with me about the temptation to stay once I got established there.  I don’t think he could fathom how much my parents would have killed me if I had dropped out of college, regardless of who much I would have been paid there.  So instead I was at ISS full time that summer, which was okay, since I was committed to staying there and paying for my dorm room.  But in hindsight, I should have just stepped away from all of that, and returned to work at camp again.

My other major project that summer was to rebuild the multimedia lab, and help setup three new editing rooms.  The department had gotten a decent grant, and bunch of new high end computers, so we had to setup the infrastructure to support them.  I had taken on the role of Departmental Assistant, and oversaw most of the practical technical details for the program from then until I graduated.  The entire lab had been built haphazardly over the previous few years, as the department grew, with no real plan or organization.  So I tore the whole room apart, repainted it, rebuilt all the desks, and rewired the network.  It was similar to my Eagle Scout project, but on a much larger scale, and with a reasonable budget.  Across the hall, I started from scratch with another room, and after a few walls were build, I wired up three new edit rooms, and setup all of the computers.  All of the systems were cleaned up and optimized, and setup to actually communicate with each other, so students could learn to share digital assets, and truly collaborate together on complex projects.

J and I were staying two floors apart in the same small building, where all of the summer students were housed, and returned to eating all of our meals together, since there were very few other people around.  Our relationship slowly returned to its previous state over the course of the summer, without much conscious or deliberate action on our part, but we didn’t really define or formalized it.  That conversation was probably my job to initiate, but I had no clue how to do that back then.  She was also making occasional weekend trips to San Jose for her research project, and working with a guy up there on some joint microbiological experiment.  We spent a lot of time together, and gradually reconnected in steps over the course of the summer.