Monday’s Assembly featured the group of Stanford lecturers who teach The Creative Process cluster. Each of the four described their upbringing and talked about how it influences the work they do today.

And they all advocated one activity above all: play.

“We are creators,” said John Barton who attended Exeter like his father and heads the cluster. “We make things. In short, we play.”

He called play the major factor that influenced all of their work. He described play as “intense, rigorous and can happen anywhere.” It seems play allows creativity to flow and new projects to be formed and completed. 

“I play and play and play, with curiosity leading the way,” said John Edmar, another of the team.

All of this is part of the creative cluster, in its second year here at Exeter Summer School. In this cluster students from around the world dream up and design new projects with the help of lecturers from Stanford University. In each class play is always invited. According to Annalisa Boslough, a Stanford graduate student lecturing in the cluster, play embodies creativity, community, engagement and experience.

“We see play as Harkness,” said another lecturer, Amy Larimer. Harkness allows students to design projects without fully knowing the end result, she said. The cluster’s crowning project so far this summer has been the geodesic Dome outside the Academy Center. “We brought the Harkness Table to the Dome.” said Larimer.

“Play is not frivolous.”

Brian Calnan, Jan Trueman, and Alex Braile keep campus lively with excursions to different places in the New England area while holding the reputation for the most dynamic people on campus every summer. But who really are the Deans of Fun?

The crew usually starts their day around five in the morning; taking students on one of the most loved trips, the polar bear swim. Throughout the rest of the day, the Deans of Fun are selling tickets, giving students information about trips, coordinating chaperones, preparing modes of transportation, and planning events for students who choose to stay on campus. And to close their day the Deans of Fun don’t stray away from their passion. They keep kids elated even during dorm checks.

“We hope that everyone comes through our office, and one thing that I think is really cool is I get to say hey or hi to almost everyone on this campus,” said Calnan.

Believe it or not, the student activities office is one of the busiest places on campus during the summer session. Between February and March is when trips for the summer session are planned. For summer 2015 there are a total of thirty-five trips offered to students.

“I love the variety of things we get to do in such a short amount of time, it is busy, but it is fun,” said Jan Trueman.

But what few know about them is the wacky things they do when students aren’t in their office. Towards the end of the summer when things are slow they like to play a game they invented called trash ball. The game involves four trash bins of different point systems and a tennis ball.

“We challenge students as well if they don’t have to run off to class,” said Calnan.

And sometimes they just enjoy talking or interacting with the students.

“We have bizarre conversations, sometime we will run into students that remind us of our regular jobs. And sometimes just giving you guys a hard time is fun,” said  Trueman.

They even enjoy doing exciting things outside of their day-to-day jobs. For example, aside from his job as assistant director of student activities  Braile enjoys hanging out with his friends and playing Legend of Zelda video games. But when he is at work Braile said that the most fun he has is just doing what he and he co-workers do best, have a good time.

As the Deans of Fun, sometimes their hardest work is to not have fun.

“I hate to have to tell kids no,” said Calnan. For any of the Deans of Fun having to tell students they are unable to go on a trip because of a swim test or a lost lion card is the hardest part of their job.

In all, the students at Phillips Exeter Summer School love interacting with the Deans of Fun. “When we go into their office they are very friendly, and so far I have enjoyed the assemblies,” said sixteen-year-old Nikolas Kanellopoulos of Greece.