What she most likes about her job, however, is not the records and statistics, but the students themselves. Describing her year's work, she cites the spring as the busiest time; "there is a steady crescendo of activity from mid-years on," she says. And yet it is this period that Mrs. Robinson likes best, when theses are due and pile up in her office, when honors records must be prepared, and when mark-seeking students either line up far out into the Holyoke. House hallway or just swarm wildly into Room 8. For it is then, she says, that "I can finally see some results coming out of my work."

The importance of Mrs. Robinson's organizational and statistical work may be unique in the world of tutorial, but throughout the University each office seems to have its own woman employee whose services are just as invaluable and indispensable. The University Hall counterpart of Mrs. Robinson, for example, is a secretary who essentially runs the whole Registrar's Office. Since this woman has asked that her name not be used, however, she shall be known here as Miss Jones.

In the words of Registrar Sargent Kennedy, Miss Jones is, quite simply, "the most important person in my office... the woman who runs the place for me." Under Kennedy's direction, she supervises the other employees in all the regular functions of the Registrar's Office; the recording of grades and attendance, the assignment of classrooms for lectures, sections, and examinations, the compiling of the academic records of individual students, and so forth. "If Miss Jones were a man," Keenedy says, "she would undoubtedly have a Corporation appointment as assistant Registrar."

Besides supervising the office's employees in these routine tasks, Miss Jones personally carries out a job that is as valuable to the University, and difficult to execute, as it is unique and unpublicized. In the early part of each spring she carefully guesses what rank of honors-summa, magna, or cum-each one of that year's honors candidates will retain when he graduates.

The necessity for these annual guesses by Miss Jones lies in the fact that each diploma awarded with honors by the College must have the honors rank and the field of concentration hand-written in fancy script. Obviously, there would not be time to prepare all these diplomas between the final determination of honors and Commencement. It falls to Miss Jones, therefore, to sit down in April, review the academic record of each honors candidate, and accordingly predict how each will be graduated. The diplomas are then prepared on the basis of her predictions, and any mistakes she has made are remedied by inscribing new diplomas at the last minute.

These mistakes are very few, however, and Miss Jones's accurate prognostications-based, according to Kennedy, on "intelligence, experience, and a knowledge of department and course idiosyncrasies"-have consistently saved the University a good deal of both money and embarrassment.

Miss Jones works in the Registrar's Office, which is on the first floor of University Hall. Directly above her on the second floor is the office of Dean Bundy and that of his secretary, Miss Verna C. Johnson. The work of Miss Johnson may not be as unusual as that of Mrs. Robinson or Miss Jones, but she certainly deserves a place on any list of "the women who run the University."

Formerly secretary to Provost Buck, Miss Johnson now handles appointments and routine correspondence for Bundy, supervises the work of four other secretaries in the Faculty Dean's office, and arranges meetings of various special Faculty committees. In Bundy's words, she is "irreplaceable," and her work "invaluable."

As chief secretary in the office, Miss Johnson supervises the recording of Corporation actions; of the minutes of meetings of the full Faculty, the Committee on Educational Policy, and other Faculty committees; and of action on Faculty appointments. In addition, her office handles recommendations to the Corporation on matters concerning the Faculty, and she is thus acquainted with such problems as the annual budget. And finally, it is Miss Johnson, together with secretaries from the President's office in Massachusetts Hall, who sets into motion the complicated machinery whereby the appointment of a new professor is recommended and approved.

Whereas Miss Johnson in her everyday work deals with budgets and professors, Miss Gladys M. Fales is more concerned with bartenders and magicians. For it is Miss Fales who, supervising the Student Employment Office, places nearly 2,000 students a year in jobs that range from student porter in Taylor Hall to accordionist at a cocktail party.

At present Miss Fales's office lists approximately 800 jobs within the University that are open to students on a part-time basis-a number that is significantly larger now than in previous years. And this increase in employment opportunities is directly attributable to the dedicated efforts of Miss Fales, who has done everything possible to persuade employers of what she firmly believes; that "student workers are the best you can find anywhere."

Undergraduates Reliable

"We have proven that students are reliable employees, and that if we put a man on a job we will keep him there," Miss Fales says. "No boy can get work through this office," she explains, "without signing a statement that he'll remain on the job throughout the term."

It is this insistence on student reliability that Miss Fales credits with overcoming the use of local high school students in University jobs, and their replacement with college students.

Thanks to the work of Miss Fales, says Graham R. Taylor, Jr., director of Student Employment, "the incidence of students leaving their jobs during examination periods has become negligible."