I just posted this to the Saint Michael's College Class of 2013 Facebook group, and figured there is some useful info here, so why not blog it? If you haven't been there yet, check it out.

Congratulations everyone on your acceptance! Our letters went out on Friday and by now, most of you should have received your purple envelopes by now.

So what now?

Be sure to visit the Class of 2013 page on our website: http://www.smcvt.edu/newclass. You'll find links to all the events we're hosting in the upcoming weeks.

Also, the next two Thursdays (March 26th and April 2nd) the Saint Michael's College Bloggers will be hosting Virtual Open Houses from 7pm - 9pm. Chat with the Bloggers, get your questions answered, and get the inside scoop on what it's like to be a student at Saint Michael's. http://www.smcvt.edu/openhouse

And finally, use this site as a way to connect. It was created for you. Please feel to talk about whatever interests you. This is your page, we just created to make sure you had place to meet your future classmates.

Cheers,
Drew & the Bloggers

Congratulations to the latest group accepted into the Class of 2013!

Ellie and I brought letters to the Burlington Post Office late Friday afternoon, so they should begin hitting your mailboxes.

Keep an eye on your inbox as you'll soon be getting some important emails from us! Caongrats again and here are a couple of photos from the day.

What do Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, and the Saint Michael's College Bloggers have in common?

They're all on Twitter!

That's right we're finally up and rolling on Twitter, the fastest growing social networking site out there right now. You can see our feeds at www.smcvt.edu/blogs.

It's taken a couple of weeks of work, a lot of discussion and some great work by Sarah Gabriele to get working just right and now we are in business. I think it's looks great and provides a unique glimpse into the student experience here at Saint Michael's.

There's so much going on here, and not all of it is fit for a blog. With a micro-blogging tool like Twitter, you're now getting and even better picture of what our students are experiencing on our campus and off.

So go to www.smcvt.edu/blogs and check out DanOSMC2011, ChristineSMC, Mairead330, DustinSMC (he's not up yet, but will be soon) and of course, I'm up there DrewSMC.

Tweet ya later!

To many of you, I'm willing to bet that when you hear camp used as a noun, you think summer camp with camp counselors and bunk houses, etc. Well in Vermont, camp is the equivalent of a lake house or a cabin.

My grandparents, my great grandmother and great uncle all had camps on Seymour Lake in Morgan Center Vermont. It's where I spent my summers as a kid and it's where my little love affair with Vermont started.

I'm incredibly lucky in that my grandparents camp is still in the family and that my parents and uncles allow my wife and I to make use of it just about whenever we have the desire. It's about an hour and a half drive from our house and provides a nice little get away when we need it.

Friday night, we decided to take advantage of it and get away. I was able to spend some time focusing on homework for a grad class I'm taking, and Maria was able to get work done on a baby blanket she's knitting for a friend of ours.

Here are a couple photos from the weekend. It was quite warm and there were a lot of ice fisherman taking their shanty's on the ice. I think that the season ends next weekend and they've got to have them off by this coming Sunday. By the end of the weekend, there was just one lonely shanty on the entire lake.

Hope they get it off soon!

It's always a hot topic in Vermont and certainly is here at SMC as well.
I've got a couple of links here for you in reagrds to sustainability efforts at SMC.

The first is an article that recently appeared it the Echo: http://journalism.smcvt.edu/echo/03.03.09/Stories/Features/compost.html

The second, just showing that our president gets into the recycling thing too, and has a sense of humor. scroll about halfway down: http://www.smcvt.edu/sustainability/projects/recycling.asp

It seems like Twitter is everywhere right now. I'm a huge fan of the Daily Show and some of you may have seen the recent clip on the Daily show about Twitter.

I think it's such a cool tool and I'm excited to say that the Saint Michael's College Bloggers will be getting on board with it shortly. I'm on it and have been on it for a while, www.twitter.com/drewsmc.

Keep an eye out for updates from the Bloggers in 140 characters or less!

Hey everyone! I know I've been really lame with this, but things here have been crazy!

We're really busy reading applications, hustling to get them ready to hit the mail in March!

My duties with the swimming and diving teams have also kept me busy. We rolled in from the Women's NE champs at about 2am this morning. We took 3rd place out of 24 teams!!!! Incredible races by everyone!

Anyway, that's just a quick, here's what's up. I'll give you more detail when I get a chance to breath.

It's been busy here in the Hoehl Welcome Center.

Our second batch of Early Action acceptance letters went out so if you applied to the December 1st deadline, you should have heard from us by now. I keep meaning to take a video of us bring letters to the post office, but the conditions are never quite right. Either we're rushing to get there before the post office is about to close, it's too dark out, or I completely forget. Hopefully I'll get one for the next round which should be hitting the mail in March.

I had the quintessential Vermont outdoorsy weekend last weekend. Skied Saturday at Smuggs, snowshoed for a couple of hours in the woods behind my house on Sunday. There's no better feeling than having been outside on a cold winter's day exercising and then coming into a warm house in lounging by a wood stove.

It's good for the soul.

It's not great for the bum ankle. I finally broke down and made a doctor's appointment to get the ankle that I rolled playing basketball before Christmas. I've been playing ball on it, but playing basketball is a lot different from skiing in the trees at Smuggs and needing to put your full weight on it to avoid hugging lumber.

The Saint Michael's College Blogger's Facebook page, Class of 2013 Facebook page and Knightspace are all hopping. Be sure to check them out. Drop me a line if you hare having trouble finding any of them. amillikin at smcvt.edu.

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Now playing: Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds - Ants Marching (Live)
via FoxyTunes

I was playing around with this yesterday, and I missed that little warning message that said something like if you change your template, be fore you do you should copy and save the current one because you can't go back.

now I've lost my old one and am struggling to find one that I like. There's something funky going on with the html for the color and fonts on the title and links. I'm working on getting this back to looking good, but I'm a self-taught tech guy and this could take a while..

Time for another give away!

Hey everyone,

For every new topic posted on the discussion board of the Saint Michael's College Bloggers page your name will get one raffle entry.

For every response to a post, you'll be entered one raffle entry.

We'll have drawings every month for free t-shirts, water bottles and other SMC gear!!!

Posting photos of you in SMC gear or on SMC campus, etc. count too (of course keep them appropriate)!

Be sure to check out the Saint Michael's College Class of 2013 group too. The same rules apply there as well.

I'm a lame blogger. I know it. I've totally neglected this thing. Good thing the Saint Micheal's College Bloggers are picking up the slack for me.

Have you, by the way, seen what they're up to? In addition to the great blogging they're doing, they're hanging out on the Saint Michael's College Bloggers and the Class of 2013 Facebook groups. They've also been on KnightSpace - the private social network for accepted students.

Check 'em out if you get a chance.

We'll also be hosting some Virtual Open Houses in January and February.

Check back soon. i'll post some more goodies.

The Saint Michael's College Bloggers Facebook Group has been busy. Check it out here!

Conor and Maria and I have been working hard to create a replacement for the old, and busted, message board.

The technology just got too old and there were too many bugs with it. Plus we were limited by what we could do. It was really just posting text and discussion threads.

The new Parent Network has a bunch of neat functions. We still have a function similar to the message board in the "forum". We can now post images, link to the blogs, post news clips, and create real connections between prospective parents, parents of current students, and admission reps. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get some of our Saint Michael's College Bloggers on there as well.

I think it's going to be a great tool to help parents get through the confusing admission process and provide insight into the Saint Michael's College experience through the eyes of a parent of a current student.

Here's the link: http://www.smcvt.edu/prospectiveparents

Check it out. Log on and have fun with it!

Burlington was featured in the NY Times Travel section. Check out the story here.

I'm still cleaning up from my travels over the last couple of months, and I found this photograph from the first week of travel.

I stopped at Cafe Beignet in Scranton, PA for breakfast and it's an absolute must if you find yourself in the home of "the Office."



The beignet were awesome and the coffee was great as well. I was most impressed with their commitment to MSSC, the Milk Saving Starving Children Foundation. All of their profits go to MSSC which provides milk to starving children around the world. Great food and great coffee and supporting a good cause.

I'm not even going to bother to apologize for not writing in such a long time. It would be nothing but a lame excuse. I've just been lame. I played around with my template and went for something a little less boring and, well, blah. I'm sure it will help to keep the creative waters running.

So, there's been a couple of new developments over here. For one, I'm here., off the road and back in the 802 & psyched.

It's been the first full week of coaching the swim team, and so far that's been great. We have our first home meet of the season this Saturday and i'm very much looking forward to it.

We rolled out the first meet the bloggers email and will have a couple of surprises coming soon as well. The Bloggers are all up on the page (www.smcvt.edu/blogs) and writing some great stuff. My next goal is to help people connect with them on the Saint MCiahel's College Bloggers Facebook group.

If anyone out there has questions that they'd like to ask or comments, the Bloggers Group would be a great place for that.

That's about it from me here. For the first time in a long time, I'm totally unpacked and all my materials are put away. I can see the carpet in my office and I can almost see my desk! I haven't seen either since I moved into this space!


Oh, and in celebration of Halloween, totally rocking my orange Halloween socks!


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Now playing: Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
via FoxyTunes

The battle with writer's block continues. Perhaps it's the 5 weeks of hotels, rental cars, and airplanes that is inhibiting my creativity? Whatever it is, I've got some content to create for some admission office emails and need to get the juices flowing. Blog, please help me out.

I'm driving around in a Prius for the next two weeks. I feel very pretentious and am enjoying looking down on all those people who are killing the environment with their traditional cars. For a car that is so revolutionary and marketed, the interior stinks. There's an obnoxious beep that turns on when you put it into reverse. The radio controls are on a touch screen which is cool, except there's an area on the dashboard that looks like a radio should be there. In fact it is there, it's just covered up by a tinted piece of plastic. Forget the touch screen, just put the radio controls where they belong. My only other complaint is that the seat is killing my back. It's like having a seat with lumbar support and having that lumbar support cranked all the way up. Maybe some people don't mind that, but my back is feeling it and it's only been two days.

Just found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald is buried in Rockville, MD, not far from here. He's one of my favorite authors and I definitely plan on visiting and paying homage when I get some down time.


Bought Weezer's Red Album. Awesome.

Everytime I've worn either a Red Sox or Patirots article of clothing durring one of their respective games, they've lost. No more. Sox and Pats stuff is in the closet till the off season.

Okay, I've loosened things up a bit. Time to get some work done.


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Now playing: Weezer - Troublemaker
via FoxyTunes

Some may have heard, but Dr. John Reiss was accidentally shot and killed in his home. Dave also posted about Dr. Reiss today.

I had Dr. Reiss for American Literature I my senior year at SMC. I loved that class. It wasn't only the material that we covered, but it was Dr. Reiss's dry wit that I appreciated.

I'll never forget the day that Dr. Reiss called me after one class. He recognized my enthusiasm for literature and said that he had recommended me for an Honors Irish Literature class. He said he knew I wasn't in the Honors Program at the time, but I was talented enough and had displayed such a love of literature that he thought I would enjoy it.

That Irish Lit. class was the best class I had at Saint Michael's. I loved every single class. It's one that I honestly looked forward to going to every single day.

I never thanked Dr. Reiss for that. I should have, but he retired that semester, and I would occasionally see him in the hallway from a distance, but for some reason, I just never took the time to say, "thank you."

Dr. Reiss, thank you.