The Adventure of a Lifetime

Note: This is a short summary post of my entire CP and my reflections on it.  I may post new entries covering everything I can remember that happened each of the seven months I was in Disney, including pictures and video.

It has been so long now; I look back at my adventures while in the college program and only see a big blur. I experienced both good times and bad times; happy times and sad times; closeness and loneliness.

The life of a cast member working at Disney was enjoyable for the most part. Any workplace one works at throughout one's life is full of those that cause drama and are just overall unkind to others. Disney's work environment is no different. It is full of workers whom make others business their business and form cliques with each other thus giving some worker's a feeling of being an outcast. Overall, it is like being in high school. However, I try not to dwell on the negative experiences and focus on what made me happy.

Things that made me happy and enjoy the time I had included:

• Meeting Pluto and giving him many hugs.
• Pluto is my favorite character and 95% of the time I enjoyed the interactions I had with him. I may have met him more than I should have at the beginning of my program but I was just so excited to see him after not getting to visit as a child. I mainly met in an attempt to make friends since the group I had formed before the program slowly diminished, or at least I diminished from it. I also met Pluto, though, because I loved receiving warm hugs from him and getting to have some fun (and share that fun with Pluto's friends).  Also, thanks to a good friend, I got to meet Pluto pre-CDCT parade once and post-Christmas parade once.

•  Meeting new friends.
• I made some enemies.  Those cliques I mentioned before weren't very fond of the amount of times I visited Pluto.  But through some of these interactions I made some friends.  One of which I met through another friend.  He and I did a lot together towards the second half of my program and I would have been lost and lonely without him.  Thankfully, I still have some of those friends today.

• Getting to experience entertainment unlike any I'd ever seen before.
• I saw the fireworks spectacular Wishes several times and the wonderful show Fantasmic! a lot as well.  These coupled with the various parades and, of course, the characters were really enjoyable.

• The work was something I truly enjoyed.
• Even though my work involved a lot of heavy lifting and sweating, I fully enjoyed it.  I got to create joy in others, whether they were young or old.  No matter the age, I treated everyone the same and made sure everyone had a smile at the end of the day.  That's all I wanted to do...create smiles and happiness.

So even though I had some bad times, I had good times.  These bad times could have been avoided if I had just fallen in line and conformed to what others think, but I chose not to and would rather be myself any day no matter what some rumor-mongering coworker says.

All in all, I'm glad I did the program as it provided me work experience and more importantly, life experience.  Will I do another program someday? I don't know yet, but it's always a possibility.