Turning Paperwork into Placements during Pickups Week

By Wednesday afternoon of Week Five, the JEP House is always buzzing. Program Assistants move between staff offices to clarify questions, front office assistants help with TB test uploads, and, in this year’s case, the buzzing was quite literal due to an unusual increase in mosquitoes on the JEP porch …but that’s a story for another day.

The most common sight, though, is students arriving one after another to pick up their assignment packets, sitting down with our Program Assistants and learning the details they have been waiting for: which school or organization they’ll be working at, what grade they’ll be teaching or supporting and what their JEP experience will look like for the rest of the semester.

For some, that might mean discovering they’ll soon be figuring out how to introduce geology concepts to a kindergarten classroom. For others, it could mean being matched with a student as a mentor or tutor, supporting a teacher in the classroom or working with a community organization.

But long before a student receives that packet, a lot has already happened behind the scenes.

Each semester, JEP staff and student leaders work through a complicated process that takes into account students’ USC courses, schedules and transportation, along with the specific needs and availability of JEP’s partner schools and classrooms. Program Assistants organize students into mini-teams or specific individual assignments, while JEP’s school partners and staff work together to find the right placement for each group or individual.

By the time ‘Pickups Week’ arrives, those moving pieces finally come together.

“Assignment pick up time is a really important time at JEP because we are working to coordinate so many different moving parts,” said Anya Shah, JEP’s Program Assistant Coordinator. “We’re working with the schools and community organizations and are making sure that any USC students we’re sending to these sites have all of the requirements expected of them.”

Those requirements include training, a negative TB test and Live Scan clearance. But checking those boxes is only half of the fun. 

“We’re also working with students as they navigate this really busy time of getting their assignments, learning about the school that they’re working at, which classrooms they’re going to be in and what grade they’re going to be working with,” Shah said. “Working with second graders and working with high schoolers or middle schoolers is a very different experience.”

During Pickups, students sit down with one of our Program Assistants to review their assignments, confirm that their schedules still work and walk through the materials they’ll use throughout the semester. And because schedules can change between sign-ups and Week Five, there is inevitably some troubleshooting along the way.

That, too, is part of the process.

For Fiona Martin, a junior majoring in Behavioral Economics who is participating in JEP through a psychology course, the experience left her feeling ready to begin.

“I signed up for JEP because I love working with kids and I wanted to broaden my experience in that context,” Martin said. “Going here and going through all the assignments and instructions, I felt really prepared, and I’m so excited to start.”

For many students, picking up their assignment is the moment their JEP experience becomes real: they learn where they are going, who they will be working with and what the semester ahead will look like. And the following week, they finally step into their schools and partner sites, meet the people they’ll be working with and begin turning an assignment on paper into a semester of real relationships and experiences.