In the spring of 2001, I contacted Chuck Beckman, CTY's public relations person, about an article I had seen mentioned on some websites called "An Insider's History to CTY: The First 10 Years". I wanted to get a copy of this article, for the history section of my webpage. As Mr. Beckman had already been extremely helpful when I contacted him about my essay, I thought he might be able to help, to mail me a copy of the article. Instead, he offered to meet with me at the CTY offices, and give me a copy of the article then. At the time, I was living in Washington, DC, and it was a 5 dollar train ride to Baltimore. As I had been meaning to visit Baltimore for a while to see some friends, I accepted the offer to visit the CTY offices.

I got to Baltimore early Tuesday afternoon in the spring, and my friend Max- a fellow CTYer- and I headed over to the CTY offices. Mr. Beckman received us graciously, and in addition to the article I asked for, gave me copies of some other useful information and even a video about CTY. He both listened to our questions and concerns, and talked to us about some of the details about running CTY. For example, we talked a bit about England's new public gifted education programs, that are using CTY as a model, and CTY's role in that, as well as the problems with running a CTY alumni association.

After our talk, he gave us a tour of the CTY offices. Covering a couple floors of the an office building near JHU's campus, the offices are where all the year round employees plan CTY, run the year round tutorial programs, and do some research dealing with gifted students. The walls are covered with poster-sized photos of happy CTYers. During the course of our tour, we bumped into Galen White, who both Max and I knew from when he was the Dean of Residential Life while we were students at Carlisle. As Mr. Beckman had other obligations, he left us with Galen.

While our talk with Mr. Beckman had been mostly about the behind the scenes bits of CTY, Galen talked more about running the CTY summer program. Besides reminiscing about people we all knew, we talked a little bit about how they went about choosing RAs and other staff, and how they train them. We found that some of the things that we and our friends had done had made its way into the training for Deans of Res Life!

Overall, my visits to the Baltimore offices of CTY were very informative and helpful. Despite some of the conflicts I've had with both the administration of the sites while I was a student and with some of the Baltimore staff as an alum, I was received very well. A lot of the information I gathered made its way into the webpage in one form or another. If nothing else, it made me appreciate the hard work that goes into running CTY, and helped me to understand some of the problems the administration faces.