Mystery Solved

First of all, while I was trying to create a little suspense, I wasn't intentionally trying to drag it out. I didn't have a chance to blog yesterday and I was gone all day today, so this is really the first chance I'm getting. I'm sorry to keep you waiting!

Back to the mystery of the Gerbera Daisy I found on my desk Thursday morning. I'd momentarily stepped out of my office when the flower bandit struck, leaving one for me, one for K-dog, and one for Lovely Miss L, so it really was a nice little surprise for me when I returned. I learned quickly that our colleague, who happens to be the Assistant Dean of Students, left them for us.

But why?

You might remember me mentioning that I had been working on a program with a faculty member in Psychology. We put together a collaborative, multi-disciplinary panel of speakers to discuss graduate school and careers in human services. Our panel consisted of a Clinical Psych faculty (not the one I was working with to organize the event), a Sociology/Human Services faculty who had a Masters of Social Work (MSW), myself (Counseling Psych), Lovely Miss L (a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)), and K-Dog (Clinical Psych). We prepared a few answers to our most frequently asked career/grad school questions, and hoped the student participants would have questions.

So I worked to get our panelists on board a while ago and spent much of this week and last week ironing out the details. We invited Psych and Soc majors and minors by email and my co-planner announced the program in her classes. We asked students to RSVP because we'd be feeding them. We hoped to have 15-20 students, which would be a decent turnout for such a program.

The invitation was sent last Thursday and by Friday at 5, we had received 15 responses. Woohoo! By the end of the day Monday, we'd gotten a few more and estimated we'd have nearly 40 people, including the panelists and other faculty who had been invited. I went shopping for snacks and drinks on Monday night, laughing about how much crap I piled in my cart. By Tuesday night we had 39 responses and had to change our location. At this point, Lovely Miss L was starting to get anxious about speaking to such a large group. By Wednesday morning, we had 50 student RSVPs! The program was Wednesday night, by the way. I flipped out at this point. Not because I had to speak in front of a large group, but because suddenly we did not have enough snacks, drinks OR plates/napkins. AND K-Dog started asking me questions about what he was supposed to do/say (I sent him a memo), the format of the program (also in the memo), and he started offering suggestions... though to his credit, he did apologize for not being involved in the process and then offering suggestions at the last minute. He also ran to get more snacks, drinks, etc., thank goodness because I had appointments!

The program went well, we had a very full room, some pretty good questions and our panelists seemed to enjoy themselves. The biggest compliment for me was when our Psych faculty panelist said, "Gosh, we've clearly invited the wrong people before! In the past when we've tried to do this we've had 8 students show up!"

When Miss L and I were cleaning up after the program we ran into B, who does men's programming and works directly under our Assistant Dean. He was excited to know how things went, especially since he talked me off a proverbial ledge when I was freaking out earlier. He was astounded that we only invited people through email and word of mouth, rather than posters, Facebook, etc. Oddly enough, B ran into the Assistant Dean at the grocery store later that evening and "told her the buzz" about our program. She was so excited and happy for us that she bought us the flowers. She loves giving small personal gifts and told us she wanted to do something nice since we'd put together such an awesome program that students were clearly interested in. She was also very happy that we were able to collaborate!

The rest of the week passed by in an exhausted blur. I'm hanging up my party planning hat for a while.

So that's it. Mystery solved.

All right, be honest. How many of you thought I had a romantic secret (or not-so-secret) admirer?