I never expected to get the job as a freshman orientation leader when I applied for it. After all, I was an average student, most of my activities were off-campus, and I wasn't in any kind of fraternity or student support group or activities committee or anything. How could someone as uninvolved as me get hired for a job like this?

As it turns out, my overall aloofness to campus events was a selling point. The LOBOrientation directorship needed a diverse group of students to properly portray the range of avaliable options to incoming freshmen. So even though I'd applied mostly because I'd just lost the job at AOHell and needed money to pay off my dorm bill, I was one of twenty students tabbed to introduce new students to my university.

It's a good thing I got the gig, because this turned out to be the best job I ever had.

Our group of leaders came together at just the right time. We'd all had some significant letdown within the last year -- getting fired, losing a grandparent, breaking up with a long-term significant other -- and needed understanding, supportive friends that we just weren't finding otherwise. This group was a godsend for almost all of us. Almost immediately we bonded, knit as tightly as if we'd known each other for years -- to borrow a phrase almost used in the comments of my Academic Decathlon entry, it was "a Breakfast Club moment."

The program director had told us in our interviews that we would become friends with our co-workers, but I don't think any of us expected it to happen quite on the level that it did. Yes, we had fun during working hours -- discussing the job, working out presentations, dealing good-natured shit talk. But in a drastic departure from any other job I've had before or since, we actively sought each other out when we weren't at work. We went so far as to draw up a social calendar to make sure that a week would not pass without spending time together outside of work.

The job itself was less remarkable. Giving tours, answering questions about campus life and helping kids work out their first-semester schedules was good for the soul, but it got repetitive and tiresome eventually. However, we knew that we had each other there, keeping us on our toes and keeping our hearts happy even if our minds were numb from drudgery.

I loved being an orientation leader so much I did it twice. Thanks to this job, a lot of people I never would have approached otherwise have become lifelong friends. In fact, one of them ended up having my baby. But that's another entry.