Travails with Student Recruiter

Season changes of Spring through Winter barely figure to your Student Recruiter. No sense by that reckoning of new growth or year's end for me. My planet Earth orbits through the times of Exhibitions and School Visits and back again. My New Year's Eve is February 1st, when the CAO harvest is brought in and attention turns to nurturing postgrads. I deck the halls in November, to make Open Day shine.

Such work brings me beyond our communal precincts and year round I travel forth to bring the word to the unknowing ("DCU? Where's that, then?"), armed only with a prospectus - my good book against detractors - and a colourful pop-up stand. Even the meek quickly learn that working a school visit will prepare the speaker to face Judgement Day with a smile (and possibly a colourful pop-up stand). It becomes an instinct to bend like a willow to the vibes permeating from your audience. Are the backs straight, hands on knees, expectant smiles fixed, notebooks at the ready? Or am I in the den of the slouchers, with their heavy eyelids and heavier derision, who simply hope the session is better than the double-maths class they escaped from.

Only daily devotion to the good book allows you to field questions ranging from: "If I take Accounting, right, like, do I get an exemption from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Foundation Stage papers 1 through 4?" to the student whose priorities for the near future are summed up with, "got any free pens?"

You chant your mantra as protection from ignorance: www.dcu.ie

Where there is pleasure there is pain, and every rose has its thorn. True also of Exhibitions, where one finds that, while dynamic go-getters make your life easier with specific and directed queries, the laziest of students are equipped by teenage angst to counter the very best of hard sell.

"We have 36 fulltime undergraduate programmes for you to choose from."

"Yeah, but UL has a swimming pool, Trinity's right beside Temple Bar, and my sister's boyfriend's cousin's youngfle' went to UCD and said it was only massive."

"Erm ... Dublin City University is in the top two for career placement when you graduate."

"Yeah, but the CIT stand is giving out lollypops."

Too often, regarded as a pure L 7* by a rank of growling teenagers, the cold coliseum wall presses into my back, and I struggle to assure myself it is just my warm, colourful pop-up stand. As to the fruits of my labour, the reward to me of this pilgrim's path; when those who have been chosen gather for the feast of learning, I have already left on my travels again, bent by the wind and rain, and a rather heavy pop-up stand. To borrow a line: the Autumn moon lights my way, it's time to ramble on.