It’s 5:30 a.m. and the alarm goes off on the hotel nightstand.  Time to get up, pull the ironing board out of the closet and drink coffee like it’s the only thing left to consume on this earth. I get dressed, put on the tie and hit the road for another day of visiting high schools – high schools where future Spartans may be.

Being away from family is one of the hardest things a person will have to do, but what if that family had more than 2,000 people in it? Castleton College is where I call home. It’s what I call my family. Castleton is so dear to my heart that I’ve hit the road for the Admissions Office to try to spread the word about the family that we are all a part of.

For the next 10 weeks, I will be visiting high schools in western Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland. Five other representatives are out now with different territories, so our paths may never cross.

The first visit of the first day was a mini college fair at SABIS International Charter School in Massachusetts. This is a fair that many different colleges will attend and set up a booth so students can walk around and browse at different schools. After setting up my booth, the students came in shortly after. It was go time.

Their reactions to Castleton were wide-ranging. One student walked up to the booth and shouted, “Vermont!?” with a confused look on her face, then turned around and walked away. Others were of course intrigued by Castleton and were interested in checking it out. There were so many colleges and so many choices for students to make that morning, but I was able to walk away with 17 cards with students’ information.

After the fair, it was time to visit high schools. The excitement was overwhelming. How many students will show up for these? The answer is two. That’s right, two. Three high schools in one day and two of them only had one student interested, and nobody showed up for one of them. The excitement went down after that.

Day two was just as bad. Four visits and only a handful of students. On the bright side, the lack of quantity is made up for in quality. These students interested in Castleton all are trying to find themselves. 

Jesse Molin from Granby, Mass., wants to apply and is interested in business. After talking to Molin about the business program at Castleton, his face lit up and said, “I can totally see myself coming to Vermont.”

Emily Eckstrom, from Bristol, Conn., plays tennis and wants to be a journalist. Her eyes widened after she was informed of the concentration in journalism Castleton offers in communications, and was excited when she knew I would be writing about her in the paper that she will hopefully be writing for in the future.

The open road still holds a lot of adventures. There are only a select few who can take the brutality and loneliness of the road, and I really hope that I am one of them.