And While Lenin Read a Book on Marx (Which One?)

This summer, I spent six weeks as a resident assistant at the Loudonville, NY site of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer program. The job essentially consisted of entertaining and dealing/interacting/living with the students when they weren't in class. I have a bunch of scattered thoughts about the experience that I haven't organized yet, so here they are in scattered form:

• The job is extremely fun, but extremely exhausting. You're always running around, you're on a fixed, full schedule, and you have to deal with pubescent teenagers with the added caveat that they're (mostly) extremely bright. If you enjoy working with kids and like the quirks that come along with being a "talented youth", then I highly reccomend the job, but be prepared to collapse the day after work ends.
• Wait until after you've had a year of college to take this job. I was the only staff member who hadn't gone to college yet, and it set me back in two respects: a. All the other staff had a common experience around which to bond/form friendships/etc., and b. there are certain interpersonal skills that I'm now convinced can only come from living and working with non-family members for an extended period of time that I simply lacked. Although my age didn't affect my work with the students that much, those two factors (along with a bad first impression on my part) made interactions with the other staff a lot more difficult.
• If you're a former CTY student yourself, make sure the emphasis is on former. Knowing how CTY worked and how the students thought was an enourmous asset to my work, but I had to constantly check myself to make sure I was keeping an appropriate boundary between myself and the students. If that boundary can be maintained, though, I think being a former student puts you in a very good position to do the job well.
• Another point from a former student's perspective: Be prepared to face some issues that you never knew existed when you were a student. Coming into the job, I expected to face issues with students, but I was unprepared for issues on the administrative side of things. As a student I always thought everything was perfectly organized and planned out and just all-around squeaky-clean on the administrative side. This is not always the case, and in addition to being able to deal with any such issues you also have to be able to keep the issues from the students, so they think everything is perfectly organized and planned out.
• As awesome as the job was, the one thing I really missed was doing anything academic. My favorite part of CTY (and of most of my life so far) was the classes, and as an RA you miss out on that side of the program, for the most part. If I do CTY again next year, it may be as a teaching assistant.

I'm sure there's a lot more to say, but after six weeks of having CTY be the only thing on my mind, I really don't want to think about it any more.