New Recording 32

Deanna is the mail and package services supervisor at Colby. She ensures smooth operations in the mailroom, hires and trains student workers, manages budgets, and aims to improve services. The mailroom serves as a learning space for students, providing support and life skills. Deanna faces challenges like name mix-ups and coordinating with carriers. During peak times, like holidays, they prepare and inform staff and students. Deanna fosters an inclusive environment for local and international students, learning about their backgrounds and building friendships. Lockers were implemented to allow students to pick up packages outside of open hours and create a safer space in the busy mailroom. Okay, I have my backup running. Yeah, I guess it's just casual. So, hi, Deanna. So, I'll be interviewing you and asking you questions about the mailroom. Could you please introduce yourself and describe your role in the mailroom? My name is Deanna Armstrong, and I am the mail and package services supervisor. Essentially what I do is I just ensure the day-to-day is done properly. We review packages and mail. We also deliver and send out everything that goes through the entire college. I also hire and train student workers, create schedules, coordinate with multiple carriers daily and their delivery drivers. I maintain our department budget, and I try to find ways to improve the mailroom either by small aspects or large aspects as well. Great. Is there a particular reason why you chose to work at the Colby mailroom as the manager? Well, after I got out of the Marine Corps, essentially I was looking for a career to get into, and I bounced around from job to job. And after a while, I found myself at the State of Maine in the mailroom. I really enjoyed it there, but I felt like I wasn't being challenged enough. So, I got lucky enough to find Colby as they were hiring for a mail services supervisor. And throughout the whole interview process, I could tell that Colby would be a really good fit, and I got lucky enough to get the job. Nice. What do you think your role in the mailroom really is beyond managing everything, the practices, the mail? I feel like incoming and outgoing mail is actually only about 70% of the job. I'd like to think that the mailroom is actually more of a place where our student workers can learn and grow. Some of the student workers that we hire, we hire them as first years, and some have never had a job before, or maybe some have never even lived away from home. And home for a lot of the students can be more than a day's plane ride away. So, the cost that aligns with the students having to fly to and from home causes many students to actually stay on campus, not only through the holidays, but even through the summers throughout many years. I feel like we try to provide more of a listening ear to let them know that someone is there for them, hopefully teach them some life skills along the way, and let them ask questions that they might be able to turn to a family member for. But since they're away from home, we like to think that we're there for them. And when things are stressful, hopefully just be able to be somebody that's there, and maybe give them a hug if they need it. Yes, sounds great. What does a typical day in the mailroom really look like behind the scenes? Yes, so it's not all what it's cracked up to be. It doesn't go as easily as the packages just come in and they end up on the shelves. There's a lot that goes into it. We actually receive all letter mailing packages one by one as they arrive from our carriers. We go through each piece individually. Then we have to file them and put them away on the shelves or in the mail folders. We also have to send out all of our outgoing mail as well, all while simultaneously having students pick up at the window as well. So, there's a lot that goes on. It's not just as simple as them coming in and getting put away and getting picked up. There's a lot that goes into it, making sure that we're doing everything properly. I see. I've heard the mailroom is the second busiest facility on campus. How do you think the mailroom has become such an essential part of COVID life, and why is that so? That's interesting. What's the first disease? I would argue maybe the athletic syndrome. Oh, I would say you're probably correct on that. Okay. I think that everything nowadays is just done online. So, I would say at least half the population of Colby, whether or not staff, faculty, or students, they have to come over to the mailroom to pick something up. We really enjoy getting to know the people that come to the window. I feel like it's just something that the people who come to see us also enjoy, too. They like being able to chat with us when they come pick something up and knowing that we care about them as well. Students often get the finished product. What challenges do you face that students do not see when they pick up their packages? So, we actually have students here that have the same exact names, thankfully. Not in the same class year, typically, but they do have the same exact names. Also, sometimes students will order stuff in different names or under a nickname, maybe even in a wrong box number. We also get a lot of questions about when our drivers will arrive on campus, and that changes daily. It can depend on weather. It can depend on holidays, if it's a busy season. We also rely heavily on our student workers, and student workers are students first. If they're busy, we might be missing one or two of our student workers at a time, which can allow us to fall behind. But the biggest thing is just making sure that we keep up as fast as we possibly can under the times that our drivers actually arrive. How do you manage peak seasons like holidays, such as Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, when everyone's getting packages and mail? Yeah, well, you can attest to it. It's super, super busy. But essentially, all we do is we try to, as staff members, keep up with any changes in pricing along the holidays or maybe increased delivery times. We try to keep students, staff, faculty all informed of the longer times that it might take some things to get from place to place. We try to order packages and stamps, anything that we might need ahead of time for the holidays, and to just have as many student workers as we can come in and work to allow us to have more bodies in the mail room, helping to hand things out and put things away. What emotional labor comes with managing a student run space? Well, there's a lot of students at a lot of times. It's not only student workers, but it's the students that come to the window as well. And a lot of students maybe have never had to do things like this for themselves. It's a lot of their parents doing these things. So essentially, it just comes with being able to help them understand, but also helping the students learn to focus on a job when they come into work. And they can talk to us as we're getting stuff put away, but it's really trying to make sure that the students that are working are focusing on the job that's at hand, but the students that are at the window too are getting the best out of all of us, even if it is during a stressful time. How do you intentionally create an inclusive environment for local students and international students that work at the mail room? Yeah, that's an interesting one. I don't think it's ever really been an intentional part of anything that we try to do. I feel like we just try to help any student that comes to us, whether from near or far. We've got some students that are from 30 minutes down the road, and we've got some students that have got to be over 25, 26 hours away. And I think that no matter where our students come from, we just like to make sure they're in a place where they feel like they can be themselves, and they get to know the other students that are around, and just get to have that space where they can just truly do what they want and just be themselves to let other students around them know that they can do anything that they want to do. What have you learned from working with the international students? I've learned that I'm very bad with last names. We get a lot of last names in here, and we get to learn from all these students where they're from. And some of the last names, you get to know where it is that they might be from, and they get to tell you about their life and how they actually ended up in the state of Maine at Colby. And you just hear from all aspects of life where it is that they came from. And I think that's the best part of it, actually, is getting to work with the international students and learn what their life was like before they came here. And if they think they'll stay in the states or maybe even in the state of Maine, it's just very interesting to hear what their life was like before they came to Colby. What makes the Maryland culture different from other places and countries? I think we get lucky enough to have a lot of really, really great student workers. I feel like no matter where our student workers are from or what they've done before or what their parents do for work, our student workers are just one of a kind, and they just get to talk with one another in maybe a place that they would have never thought they'd have fun or find other people that they probably would never run into outside of working in the mail room. And I've gotten to see a lot of really good friendships grow from there. I'll ask about the local system. How did it come to life? So I feel like, you know, the further we go into this world, that everything is becoming just more and more technology driven. But the biggest thing is just making sure that, you know, the students have a way to get stuff. When the staff aren't at work, it's trying to create a balance of, you know, staff having a life outside of work, which is what everybody, you know, would like to think that they have, but also allowing the students to have time to go to their classes, get studying done. You know, maybe they work a job or they also do extracurricular activities, and that doesn't always align with being able to come pick up packages during the times that we're open. So getting the lockers hopefully has allowed a lot more students to get packages outside of the hours that we aren't open, but also allowed us to create a safer space for not only the staff but the student workers as well to allow for things to be put in a space where we're not always tripping over it due to the amount of packages we receive on the daily nowadays. What resistance or challenges came with implementing the locker system? I think with anything new, it can be very difficult, especially because I hear from students a lot that they typically only read the subject of an email and not actually the full email. So we are constantly battling that. But I think the greatest thing has been that the students seem to think that the lockers are actually a pretty cool system, so they take really well to learning it, and most of them end up wanting their packages in the lockers. But the resistance is definitely making the students read their emails, but the ones that do and they can train their friends and teach them how to pick stuff up is really, really appreciated. How has the locker system changed student worker behavior and the workflow? I feel like the workflow has been a bit better because with not as many packages having to go through our window and some being picked up from lockers, it's created a time that we can actually focus on putting packages away and not always having a line at the window, which is something we dealt with heavily prior to the locker system. Some students, although I said that a lot, do want their packages in a locker. I still think that they like coming up to the window and talking to the student workers or the staff that work there. So some, even though they go grab their packages out of a locker, they still do come over the window to say hi. But for the most part, I do see that students have truly liked being able to pick their package up from 4 p.m. all the way until 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning. They pick up at all different times. What moments make you proudest as a manager? I've been lucky enough to see students start at first years and come in at 18 years old and not really know what they were going to do with their life to graduating at 21, 22 years old and having life goals and just seeing them fulfill those and learn along the way and just grow as a human, not only just in the mail room or at school, but just grow in life and things that they have learned while they've been here, the friends that they've made. And hopefully those are things that we get to see them do all the rest of their life. We've had one student actually who graduated two years ago who actually just let us know that she got into law school. And it's just the little things really of learning that the students have furthered themselves in life and are really enjoying what life has to offer. How do you support student workers during stressful shifts? We do as best as we can to try to make sure that we are managing the incoming as well as the students that are also managing the window as well. It can become a real balancing game to try to make sure that we aren't checking in too many and the students aren't looking for stuff that maybe was checked in 10 seconds ago that hasn't been able to be filed on our shelf yet. But we also realize too that not only are stressful shifts stressful when it comes to busy times, but it can also be stressful when it comes to our student workers during test times or during finals, midterms, anything along those lines. So we try to create different schedules, work with students, try to make sure that the students know that if they are stressed then they can just give us a little bit of help putting stuff away that we can sit there and listen or just help with anything that it is that they might need to just get out trying to work through testing or anything that they've been doing with themselves. What do you think students misunderstand the most about the mail room? I think that because the staff and the students look happy 99% of the time, it doesn't mean that our day has always been easy. Not just staff, but students too. We juggle a lot. You've got to remember different things about different students because we've got some packages that come in that are super large or we've got some students, again, that might not read their email and something might have been put into a locker, but now we're looking for it in the mail room. We've got small packages, large packages, letter mail, which is an entirely different scenario and different place to look. But I think that it's so easy to think that because I do believe it is run very, very well in a very happy environment most of the time, that it's easy to think that the packages come in and end up on the shelves in order, and that's not how that happens. A lot of students have very similar names, and it's not as simple as it seems, but it is still one of the best places that I think people could come to pick up packages and we try to make it as good of an environment as we can for them as well. Why do you think students form such strong bonds here? I like to think it's because, again, we just have such lucky student workers or we feel like we're lucky with the student workers that we have. Again, near and far, no matter where they come from, I feel like the student workers we have, they want the other workers that are around them to know them, to learn from them. We've got some students that are from New York City that have fun teasing the students that are from Boston. They both think that they're the greatest city in the world, and it's just funny to hear them learn about the city that maybe they've never been to or maybe that they'll go to because they've met other students or maybe places that other students might never think about going. Maybe they go because they hear something from one of the other student workers, so it gives them something to talk about and to learn about, and hopefully it's something that they get to bond about the rest of their life. Yeah, very interesting. What would you want the Compass community to appreciate more about the mailroom? I think that it's a lot more complex than they think it is. Even when it comes to outgoing packages, we're trying to juggle the constant changing of times and pricing and just everything else, and we're not just learning one carrier. We're learning three, four, five different carriers and trying to memorize those. We try to be able to give estimates on timing and price as best as we can, but when things are constantly changing, it's not something that we like to seemingly maybe come across as deceitful of, but just everything's changing for us, too, so the amount of time that we do take to learn and understand more is stuff that we're doing because we want to be able to give everybody the best information that we possibly can. Unfortunately, I think that sometimes people think we're the ones that might be delivering the package down to Massachusetts two days from now, but we're also at the mercy of the carrier delivering it when they say they're going to as well, so just kind of appreciating the fact that we really do love our job, but we also put a lot of time and effort into learning and reaching more of what it is that we can do and constantly striving to be better. I see a good response. What does the mail room mean to you personally? Well, when I first started working at Colby, I thought it would just be, you know, a step up in working in a field that I grew to love. I love working with mail. I love the ins and outs of it every single day. You know you're going to receive mail. You know there's going to be outgoing mail, but you don't really know what it's going to entail. They're going to have 300 packages incoming or 500, 1,000. You don't really know, and it's the day-to-day that is really fun, but I got a lot more of that than I expected at Colby. I got to learn students that come from near and far and just have them teach me about, you know, how they grew up, what it is that they've done in their life, where it is that they would like to go, and just learning from the students that are just so intelligent that come here to Colby and things that they teach me that I might have never learned, the dates that I get to have with them from the day-to-day of just what they can teach me in different fields that I don't think I would have ever thought about learning about. And to me, it's just one of those things that I got a lot more than I thought I would, and I feel very lucky to get to know my student workers I have now, the student workers that I've graduated, and the student workers that I already can't wait to meet in the future. So to me, it's something that I just hope we get to keep growing as a family in the mailroom. Great. That's the end of the interview. Great. Thank you so much. Yes, you're welcome. What questions are you asking to John? Let me see. There are also like 20. Do I just hear his answers after you do them? Yes. I'm excited to see what he does. Is somebody interviewing you? No. But I have a feeling he might. Yeah, I'm happy I'm done with the first section. Good. Thank you.