Senior Rajpreet Heir received a letter in the mail one day asking her to come to the president's house. It was her first time ever meeting President Brian Casey.
Heir's invitation to Casey's home last spring was to offer her, and a group of her peers, the opportunity to assume the role of a presidential ambassador her senior year.
"When I arrived in July of 2008 I realized that one, I wanted to open the house up for as many events as possible," Casey said. "I wanted the house to be a place of energy and discussions and conversation, so I knew I was going to have a lot of events at the house, which has proved to be very true. And, two, I needed help with these events."
After consulting with friend and president of Ohio State University Gordon Gee, Casey decided to establish the presidential ambassador program in order to create a group of students who would serve as co-hosts of these events.
In order to develop this group, Casey went to Cindy Babington, vice president for student life and dean of students, and other faculty in academic affairs and asked them to help pick a group of twelve students who might represent and reflect the diversity and interests of the senior class.
The job of the ambassadors has always been to serve as co-hosts at events with campus visitors, like the Board of Trustees and Board of Visitors.
"Getting 250, 275 people in and out of the house on a cold night and move them around is actually a lot of work," Casey said. "A lot of what the ambassadors do is they welcome people, they take their coats, they move them to the back. When meals are about to happen they invite them into the dining room. They get them back to their car."
Senior ambassador Van Hoang said that the ambassadors recieve instructions on the layout of the event and the goals of the night when they arrive at the event.
"It's very hard for me to touch base with everybody," Casey said. "So their job is actually to truly be co-hosts. And it might seem glamorous but often it's rather not glamorous. It's quite gritty actually."
The role of the ambassador involves the practical aspects of hosting, but also includes responsibilities like making new guests feel comfortable.
"The first [event] was really awkward, I think, for most of us," Hoang said, since most of the ambassadors had never been in the situation of a cocktail party before. Since then, she has developed greater fluency in mingling and has been able to apply this skill to other jobs.
Senior ambassador Katherine Butler sees the role of the ambassador as a face for the students who can help answer any questions visitors might have about campus and to be honest about issues and controversies and express those productively.
"I think I started feeling like I was kind of playing an admissions role and I was supposed to sell DePauw," Taylor Cantril '11, a current graduate sustainability intern and former ambassador, said.
"But then I realized that I'm not talking to prospective students and families who don't know anything about DePauw," Cantril said. "I'm talking to people who went to DePauw and care a lot about it and have a lot of ideas for how it will change. So then I realized that I could be a lot more honest about my experience and that I was really kind of collaborating with them on where we thought DePauw was going, what we liked about it, what we didn't like about it."
Cantril said he took it as his responsibility to share how DePauw is doing from different student perspectives and while he may not have known how every student felt, he had a good understanding of how some of them did.
"You're always going to have a hard time representing everyone if you only have a group that small," Cantril said. "I think it probably did a fairly good job of representing voices on campus, but there are probably voices that were not included and it's partly inevitable with that small of a group."
This year's group of ambassadors includes 14 seniors: 8 men and 6 women. The students represent a range of perspectives — including domestic and international, a variety of races, the School of Music and the College of Liberal Arts, Programs of Distinction, athletic teams, greek organizations and student leaders and voices from a selection of different organizations and programs.
Senior ambassador Ashwin Upasani, an international student from India, said that he does have conversations with visitors about his international perspective, although that is certainly not the only topic he discusses.
Many alums, Upasani said, did not experience such a strong international community at DePauw when they were undergraduates. Upasani entered DePauw with a freshman class that had increased its international student population from 30 or 40 entering international students to 70, a number that has remained somewhat steady since then.
"I think DePauw itself…and the student culture on campus is I guess still evolving to the idea of having quite a considerable number of international students," Upsani said. "But I feel like we are rapidly going towards…a more cohesive campus, I would say."
Upsani shares these experiences and opinions with visitors and helps them imagine what a larger international student population at DePauw would look like and mean for the university. He sees these conversations as a mutual exchange of understanding and perspectives.
Cantril described the trustees as humble and curious, but he was not always comfortable interacting with them at the beginning.
"At first I think we [ambassadors] were kind of talking about how it was intimidating," Cantril said. "To walk into a room and know that you're going to be eating dinner with and talking with and socializing with the biggest decision makers of the university, many of the bigger donors to the university. I mean that's not like my average weekend hang out."
Zak Phillips, a fifth year triple degree student studying philosophy, violin performance and Spanish, served as an ambassador the first semester of his fourth year. During one event he was even asked to play his instrument at an event for the Board of Trustees. This year, after returning from an off-campus experience in the spring, he picked up as an ambassador once again.
Last year, Phillips said, he was more preoccupied with how new and awe-inspiring the experience of serving as an ambassador was. But this year he realized that he can affect the visitors just as they affect him. For instance, Phillips recalled one experience when he was seated next to Judson Green at an event.
"So he's asking me all these questions…and he had a sheet and he was writing down my responses…The whole idea was like, I'm sitting next to this man who created the building of which, when I was looking at universities to go to, this is really something that contributed to it — the idea of a brand new School of Music," Phillips said. "And then here I am sitting next to the man who created this and had this vision of this School of Music. And to be able to share my ideas with him and to have him note…it's like ‘Yeah, he is caring for the university.'"
Hoang, who serves as an intern at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, recalled an opportunity she had as an ambassador to sit down with Janet Prindle and learn about her experiences after college.
"For me personally, working as an intern is inspiring not just because of the group of people I work with or the task that I do…but the institute for which I work stands for something that I really admire," Hoang said. "For me, because I work [at the Prindle Institute], Janet Prindle was kind of a superstar in my eyes."
Hoang describes the encounter as so memorable because, in having a personal conversation with Janet Prindle, Hoang was able to experience and interpret her emotion in the moment — something she would not have experienced from reading a story about Prindle.
Upasani recounted his experience meeting former President Bill Clinton prior to the speech Clinton gave on campus last month. The ambassadors had been told that there might be the opportunity to meet Clinton and to be prepared for that possibility.
"It was kind of unbelievable," Upasani, who also took a photo with Clinton, said. "It kind of hit me when it was happening that ‘Oh, wow I'm meeting a president of the United States,' and just kind of thought about how things have gone over the past few years since I've been at DePauw and what all has happened…I guess senior year being able to be a presidential ambassador and being able to meet Clinton and see him for a few minutes was I guess the high point."
After the first year of the program, when Babington and representatives from academic affairs suggested potential ambassadors to Casey, new ambassadors are now selected based on the recommendations of the previous year's ambassadors.
Casey said these nominations amount to about 30 names, at which point student transcripts are examined in order to assure the ambassadors are made up of students who have done well during their time at DePauw. From there the ambassadors are selected based on how to best represent the senior class.
When asked to be an ambassador, Upasani didn't even know the ambassador program existed nor did he have much of a relationship with Casey.
Unlike Upasani, Cantril had worked closely with Casey prior to becoming an ambassador. Starting his freshman year Cantril organized the energy wars that occur between the residence halls to reduce electricity and water and worked to have Casey sign the President's Climate Commitment in order to commit DePauw to measuring its greenhouse emissions and coming up with a plan to reduce them over time during his sophomore year.
Cantril said that he thinks he was probably closer to Casey than most students, a connection that developed through repeated interaction and involvement on Cantril's part with the administration.
Hoang believes Casey may have had an idea of who she was prior to serving as an ambassador, but she did not have a personal relationship with him.
When Hoang was found out she was selected as an ambassador, it was during her semester abroad.
"For me I got an email that was related to mentoring stuff," Hoang, also a peer mentor for the First-Year Experience, said.
But when she opened the email Hoang found that the message wasn't about mentoring business after all. Instead, she was surprised to find an invitation to become an ambassador.
"The whole process was mysterious," Phillips said.
During the spring of his third year on campus Philips delivered a talk to the spouses of the Board of Trustees on an independent study project he had done. It was at this talk that he received an envelope from a student. Inside the envelope were instructions telling him to go to the Elms, the president's house, at a certain time.
Phillips had no idea what he was walking into or why he was at the Elms until he arrived. Once arriving he learned, along with the other potential ambassadors present, what they were invited to participate in and what their involvement would look like.
Other than this first introductory meeting and another at the beginning of the fall semester that provided a brief introduction to the kind of situations and events the ambassadors would participate in, the ambassadors do not meet formally with Casey or amongst themselves outside of the events they attend as presidential ambassadors.
"But I do get to know them very well because they're in my house all the time," Casey said.
Informally, the ambassadors speak with Casey about a range of issues, ranging from their personal lives to ideas about the university and world.
"While people think it's cool that we get to go there, I don't think it's as unusual as one might think, just because he's so open and welcoming," Butler said. "And I feel like I'm lucky to have that experience, but a lot of other people have had similar ones too."
Casey said that it's not unusual for him to invite different student groups over to the Elms. In fact, he said he's probably hosted more than 20 different student events at his house for various organizations on campus, ranging from Honor Scholars and captains of the sports teams to representatives from United DePauw.
"I wouldn't say that we [ambassadors] are the best representatives because I know it's not a very democratic process of who's selected," Hoang said.
While she feels that the ambassadors are well spoken and do their best to give university guests and idea of what students think and what matters to them, she said that being an ambassador "doesn't mean that we're all the shiniest and best students on campus."
Upasani sees necessity in the presidential ambassador program because it allows visitors to the university to interact with students in an organized manner in a way they might not otherwise experience, therefore providing a more recognizable face and voice of the students.
Butler, whose parents are both DePauw alums, said she has enjoyed getting to see the different ways alums experience DePauw but how they all share a passion, love and commitment to give back to the university.
"It kind of rubs off a little bit," Hoang said. "It makes you want to think that way as well."
