A Quick Hello!

I'm back!!! I finally got a new computer so I plan to be more active now. Needless to say I am near the end of my college program and my wonderful year here at Walt Disney World. But do not fret because the Island Mouse isnt ready to say goodbye to the Happiest Place on Earth just yet! This May I begin a new position in a new location and I am beyond excited for it. It will be incredibly bittersweet to leave my DVC family, but I know that this next oppurtunity will be magical. So stay tuned folks!

-Tyl

#CAClife: Part 1

Hola! 

WARNING: Okay so first things first, I am like the girl who cried blog but now this is it I am finally going to post this, excuse my grammar I probably wont be able to proofread this! 

So now that I have been here for a couple of months I guess it is time I finally tell you all how life in the most fun branch of recreation is treating me! You guessed it I am a Children's Activities Cast Member! Well you probably already knew that if you have roamed around the island mouse before, but anyways I am a CAC! Let me tell you something when your job is literally all fun and games, things get real! So since I work in a Disney Vacation Club resort there are two sides to the coin, Poolside Activities and Community Hall. This post will be all about poolside! 

This is the first training you receive, poolside activities! Basically this is all the entertainment that happens in the pool or by the pool deck starting at 1 pm in the resorts and then continues with the nightly campfire followed by the movie under the stars. When your training consists of tie-dying shirts,playing with a giant beach ball and watching a movie you know your job is going to be a blast! 

A typical day for me, and this is for my resorts it depends on your location, but for me I start my day with a quick meeting, followed by gathering all my materials and heading outside! This could be at either be at noon or at 2 o'clock.  That is where the fun begins, armed with my sunblock and water bottle I am ready to take on the whole afternoon in this Central Florida heat! On the pool deck we have pool party, trivia games and different activities going on. When its time to end the pool party we go on break and then head to prep our campfire. Campfire is then held nightly and after that we head over to prep our movie! Setting up the movie screen and taking it down seemed very intimidating at first but after so much practice you get the hang of it and can do it in around 15 mins or less! So that is a short over view of what a typical day poolside looks like, there are two of us outside and opener and a closer, so a lot of the day is spent with someone else which is amazing, because I don't know how you could ever do this all on your own! On the next post I will explain Community Hall and how the game changes when you are indoors. 

If you guys have any questions feel free to ask them on here as comments or post them to my tumblr page by the same name! I am off to work as the closer tonight! 

See you all real soon,

-Tyl

Check In and Other Shenanigans!

Hola! 

Just like that those 21 days went by extremely fast, I know I have been MIA since the last post but I had to strap down and power through my finals and the last week of school. Since then I graduated undergrad and made it safely up here to Orlando. I have been here for three days and it has been absolutely lovely, I want to keep this post short since i have to head to bed soon because of the early wake up call I have tomorrow for Traditions, but I will talk a little bit about my first few days. 

So I arrived bright and early on Monday morning and Vista Way, 15 minutes before my scheduled time of 8:00 am. I grabbed a program guide and was given a name tag sticker. The line was quite short and I don't think it took us more than 30 mins to come in the building and receive the first thing, your label with your official assignment on it. I had a fluorescent yellow sticker with my official Recreation Assignment: Children's Activities and the Resort were I was placed at. When she placed the sticker on the back of my program guide I almost cried, my placement could not be more perfect if I tried. From then we made another line and here we had or DORMS passed scanned, took the picture for our Housing ID and then received our room key. After that we received our housing ID and a piece of paper with the instructions and times for your casting, drug test,language test and the housing meeting. 

After that we were whisked off to Casting, and of course with that came all the fun of being in the bus doing the awesome countdown and heading into the building, once in the building though we did a couple of more serious things, like fill out paperwork receive our official training schedule and be finger printed. After coming back I had to do a drug test, now this is something that all CPs working lifeguard, recreation or attraction roles must do, this must be passed in order to proceed to Traditions and the rest of your training. That was that, I used the rest of Monday to move in to our lovely apartment in Chatham Square, and then all the girls in the apartment decided to head out to Downtown Disney! 

Home Sweet Home! 

Tuesday was quite a slow day with no plans except for our housing meeting, this was a very thorough presentations of the Do's and Dont's of Disney Housing. A lot of going over dorm rules, which seemed pretty obvious to me because I was an RA for three years, but a lot of people still had questions, which made the meeting last a little longer than expected. All in all it was harmless and pretty fun as well.  Then today Wednesday we had our Ariel's Grotto Pool Party over in the Commons Pool, which had a DJ and free food. This was a lot of fun and a nice event for new and current CPs to interact with each other! I made a couple of new friends from it and it was great!!  The rest of the afternoon was spent in Downtown Disney exploring and then coming back fro dinner. Now I am heading off to bed since I have to wake up in six hours so I wont miss the bus to Traditions, which will be covered in the next post. All in all these last three days have been swell! 

See ya real soon! 

Getting Accepted!

Hola!

I guess I can talk about my acceptance timeline if only a little bit. Well I applied to the Disney College Program the day that applications came out which was January 26th. I submitted my application somewhere between 6-8pm that night, I remember this because I was in class! Around an hour and a half later I received my Web Based Interview link and I was able to complete that and scheduled my phone interview for the following week. The web based interview is quite simple, it is like a personality test a way for Disney to see if you would be a good fit with the company. Following that was a long week of waiting for my phone interview to come around, that week ended before I knew it and then I was sitting in my sofa with my index cards and my notepad waiting for my phone to ring as I watched Brave. After my phone interview the real wait began. Two weeks went by and I heard nothing, I was still In Progress though so that kept me at ease. In the meantime I joined like 4 Facebook groups for DCP, including the 21+, one for Greek Life, and a Puerto Rico Group. These groups were the thing that kept me going because it was a lot of fun to interact with people on the same boat as I. Acceptances started rolling out the week of February 16th, this was the first wave with a lot of the hospitality and concierge acceptances, one of my close friends received his acceptance at this time which was very exciting.

My Acceptance Email

The week came to an end and I didn't hear anything from Disney it wasn't until the following week on Friday February 27th that I received my Congratulations Email, the email I had been waiting for forever. I was ACCEPTED for the Fall Advantage program in Walt Disney World with the role of Recreation, this was my top choice so it was very exciting to open the PDF containing my full letter. After getting accepted the few days after that involved a lot of interactions, I joined two more groups one for my arrival date and one for Recreation.  I will be arriving to Vista Way on the first Monday of check ins and I could not be more excited, I even found my roommates, more on that later though.

After my friends came over to celebrate, and I had come back down from cloud 9 :)



Stay Disney my Friends!