No wheels? No Problem!

Will life at Disney suck without a car? 

In short Yes! 

Ok its not all that bad. Here are a few tricks I learned in my time there that definitely made it more bearable. 

1. When choosing roommates, make sure that at least one of you has a car 

It just makes life so much easier when you first arrive. That first grocery shopping trip you take will be so much better with a car rather than taking the bus. Also, if you ever want to make a trip to the beach you will need a car for that. And if you are one who likes to stay until the parks close, you will get home much faster and more comfortably by car then DCP bus. That's the time when all your fellow cast mates are getting off work tired, with hurting feet and the buses are completely packed. You don't want to deal with that. But all that being said… make sure you at least offer to help with gas!!! Especially if you’re the one asking to be driven places they weren't  planning on going. 

Roommate Survey Template

I went back through my DCP Spring/Spring Advantage 14 page to find a roommate survey that i thought tackled a lot of good points for you to address when telling about yourself and looking for good matches for roommates. Please feel free to add or remove subjects.

Here are the numbers I would recommend paying attention to when looking for roommates
#12, #14 - All Numbers in DCP Details are vitally important - #1,2,3 in Lifestyle
All the rest are just good to know to see if you might make good friends

Choosing Your Roommates

Not gonna lie this is a tricky thing. Mostly because many of you who are applying for this program have never really had to live on your own. If you have lived in an apartment with roommates for school you definitely have a leg up. But if you are like me and spent 4 years in college living in dorms (not by choice my school made me), consider yourself completely disadvantaged. Yeah maybe you have had to choose one roommate before, but try choosing 5 or 7 others to live with! Now that's a tall order!

So how do you tackle this task?

Please Do's and Seriously Dont's part 2

I just found that I never posted part two so here it is.

After working for a few weeks and living in the housing, I have complied quite the list of things that i think more people should do and should not do. This is mostly a list for people who actually work for Disney. I'll do a more general list later

Housing's Please Do
1) Cook your roommates dinner one night - It brings you all together and gives you something to talk about

2) Bring a TV- Sometimes you just gotta get a group together and watch your favorite shows (Once Upon a Time or Pretty Little Liars)

3) Carry your housing ID and house key with you everywhere- PLEASE DO THIS!! Get a card holder and permanently attach it to your body. You need both of these all the time. And its unfortunate to get locked out when all your roommates are at work

Make it rain...or maybe just sprinkle?

Let me establish a fact about the Disney College Program. There is a chance that anyone who participates in the program will not get paid a lot. Some roles will get minimum wage others get more. It just depends on your role and work location.

Example: life guards get paid more because others lives are inherently in their hands. Also those who work at Magic Kingdom get paid more and im assuming its because they have the longest/most ridiculous work hours.

We get paid weekly which is actually really nice. This is the first job I've had where we get paid every week. I really like it. So in that sense it feels like you should have a lot more money than you do.

Here is the reason college program kids never have any money... (spoiler alert)

Vacation Planning - The best CP role you could possibly get!

This is no joke. I literally have the best job a CP could possibly get!

Single hand the best thing about it is that you will never get a shift that ends after 8:30 pm. And if you work at Animal Kingdom like I do, you will never end later than 4:30!!! It's so sick. I literally have the entire evening to do whatever I want. When its slow we talk and have a good time and we get rewarded for simply doing our job.

Also there is a lot more guest interaction than I thought would be part of this role. It's not the same as others because we are confined behind glass, but there are still some really great moments. Moments that we create for guests and also ones that guests create for us.

A few weeks ago I was helping a family with their military passes.

It's Freakin Cold! Did I really move to Florida?

Coming to Florida for the Spring term of the Disney College Program has its ups and downs. Honestly the hardest thing for me to get over is the weather. I thought Tulsa and Vegas was bipolar. This is a whole nother level of crazy!

I arrived on the 20th of January and thought I knew it was the middle of winter time, I had been told that all i needed was a couple of light jackets and I would be fine. That was great news for me because I was flying Southwest so I could only have two 50lb bags with me. A thick jacket would have limited my packing space.

However, a thick jacket turned out to be exactly what I needed. I have been double layering for weeks! Its finally getting to the point where I don't have to wear a jacket all day long and its the second week of March!! I kept telling my mother to not send me a jacket or long sleeve shirts because we would have single days at a time where it was really warm and humid. Those days of bliss gave me false hope for a warmer future. I mean it got cold, like snow in north Florida cold. It's a problem. Now I simply carry a jacket and umbrella almost every day cause surely it will get cold or rain at some point in the day.

Oh and on the topic of rain...

Disney classes week 1

Even though I have already graduated college (yay me!) I made the awfully strange decision to take classes while i'm doing the college program. Why? Who knows honestly. I think I have this strange desire to just make life harder for myself than it really needs to be.

The two classes I was originally taking were Exploring Marketing (EM) and Advanced Studies in Hospitality Management (ASHM). They were the only classes that related to my major and that I had not already taken in college. The first class (EM), is a basic level marketing class which i did take in college. The difference is that this class takes all those basic marketing principals, and shows how Disney applies those principals in everything they do. The other class is about applying leadership and management through group projects.

That is honestly all i can tell you about that class because I only went to two classes before I dropped it. There were several reasons for dropping that class.

Core Class Training

 My role a WDW is a Vacation Planner at Animal Kingdom, which is basically Disney's glorified version of the people who sell you tickets to events or in our case, to the parks. (my costume for DAK to the left)

Our training is one of the longest, if not the longest, of all the roles you can choose from in the college program. Officially it takes 10 days (5 of core class and 5 on the job), but it is actually a role of continual learning.

I found that I picked up the information fairly quickly in core class. They would show us how to do it and after two times on my own I was pretty good. 

Random fact #4 - I have always been a great practice player but not always the best game time player.

So I had tons of information slammed into my brain in 5 days and thought i would be fine going into on the job training. I have worked in a ticket booth before and worked in customer service a lot so I thought I'd have a leg up. Unfortunately for me, none of those things helped at all. I mean interacting with people is easy because I do that every day. Its the interacting with the computer system that's the challenge. 

Traditions (and casting)

There is a class that every new Disney cast member has to go through before they start their training with the company. This class is called Traditions.

When I arrived, I had my own version of what my schedule for the week would be like:
Monday-
check in
get settled in my apartment
Tuesday-
go to casting, get my badge and find out my work location
Wednesday-
go to Traditions
Thursday-
Begin training for new job

Unfortunately, I quickly found out that this would not be the case. My first week ended up looking more like this...

Resort Hopping!

Today (Thursday because I'm still awake even though its past midnight) we had an attempt at resort hopping. What is resort hopping you might ask? Well, it's basically something cast members (people who work for Disney) do to kill time. And i guess some vacationers do it as well because its a free way to spend your day.

Random Fact #2 - I have been to Disney World twice and I have never been inside any of the Disney hotels.

Basically our plan was to take the cast member bus to one of the resorts, look around and take pictures, then catch the monorail to another hotel. We wanted to hit up as many hotels as we could before we got tired or it got dark.

First Day's Please Do's and Seriously Don'ts

The first few days can be stressful and and tedious for everyone! Get that in your head now. Your problems are not unique and are not more important than anybody else's, SO SAVE IT!(unless they really are...).

Here is a list of things to do if you really want to piss everybody off (what not to do) followed by a list of things to do if you want everyone (including the cast) to like you. 

Seriously Dont...
1-Complain about long lines. We are all standing in them too and trust me, there are more.

And My location is...

I have finally arrived in Florida!!

Guess what?????? I found out where my work location is :) I'll give you a hint, it sort of relates to something in the picture above. But remember I'm a Vacation planner which means I work a ticket booth at one of the parks front entrances. That means there are really only 4 options for me... have you guessed it yet? Come on there are only 4 choices here people, look up all the park names then guess again...