My school offers both day and night programs for hair and skin. Before any of the students start their program of study, they attend an initiaion day designed to help all the newbies figure out the rules and regs of the school. My initiaion day was the Saturday before my first Monday of classes. Initiation was set to start at 9:30am. I was told not to arrive too early because the day classes started at 9:00 am.

Of course I was so excited and nervous that I actually arrived at the school at 8:45 am. I was instructed to come through the student entrance and to wear “all black”. There I was, completely covered in black, waiting anxiously for the initiation to begin.

I was ushered into the main meeting room where a series of tables were set up with metal folding chairs. In front of each chair was a hand decorated paperbag that said “Survival Kit”. There was also little piles of chocolates and mints and Tootsie roll pops scattered along the tables. A pack of papers was also in front of every chair.

Since I was the first to arrive, I had a few minutes to figure out where I wanted to sit (in the back of the room) and check out the scene. As new people arrived I discovered that many of the attendees were in the skin day program. Eventually I met a very pretty blonde who told me she was in the night cosmo program.

The entire room eventually filled up and there were over 20 attendees. Of those in attendance only 6 were night cosmo students like me. I was thrilled to know I was in a small class for many reasons.

Initiation was kicked off by a beautiful and very energetic school administrator who walked us through several team building exercises including adding a fruit or vegetable name with the same first letter as our first names. I became Karen Kumquat. There were also lots of great prizes won and I was thrilled to win an elegant backpack with the school’s colors and name stenciled on the back.

Lunch was provided and we left a little after 2:00 pm after being shown how to clock in and out of school, which is a very critical exercise. Every minute, every hour that is logged is credited towards that 1,500 hours that you need to quality in Texas to be a licensed cosmetologist. We all became very aware of the importance of guarding every precious minute that we logged at school.

I left Cosmo Initiation filled with anticipation and names of many new fruits and vegetables dancing in my head.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under What I Learned in Beauty School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.