The DCP: Check-in, and Cry Fests, and Junk

The time has come. You are sitting in your hotel room on a Sunday night, anxiously awaiting the next morning when you will finally check into the Disney College Program. In the parking lot, your whole soon to be apartment is jammed to the top of your car. Tomorrow’s carefully chosen clothes in the “Disney Look” are arranged carefully on a chair, waiting for you to jump into them at the first stroke of the morning alarm. You lay in your bed holding your favorite Disney plush, and wonder if your experience will be anything like all the YouTube vlogs you have shamelessly stalked in intense mental preparation for what you are sure is the most exciting and scary day of your year.

DCP Check-in

Checking into the Disney College Program is one of the most exciting things you will do to initiate your place in the company. You will have received an email from Disney Campus Recruiting with your exact check-in time, which of the four housing complexes you are to report to, and your itinerary for the rest of the week. It is important that you show up at your exact time and no earlier or later. They stagger everyone’s check-in times to keep the line moving as efficiently as possible, and you will likely get turned away and told to come back at your time if you show up early. Save yourself the time.

At your check-in, you will be standing in line with a bunch of excited, college-aged, future cast members just like yourself. This is an excellent time to make friends, because everyone has the same questions, fears, wonders, and interests, with nerves that produce constant chatter and instantaneous friendships.

You will receive your program guide, which tells you everything you need to know about living in housing, being on the program, and being a cast member. You will also get your picture taken for your housing ID (which you will need to take with you everywhere), and you will receive your apartment assignment and key, with a few other complimentary things.

Move-in

After you check-in (which usually takes about 30 minutes depending on the line), you are free to head to your apartment and begin moving in. Here you will find out who your roommates are! The bedrooms are first come, first serve, so I wouldn’t be afraid to book it to the apartment if you want to have first choice.

Move-in can be an exciting and stressful time. If you have any desire to not go insane, I would not recommend going stock-up-on-grocery shopping at the Walmart down the road from CP housing. It is always utter chaos, especially on move-in weeks, and you will have a much more pleasant shopping experience if you go to the one that is a tiny bit farther away.

Your First Week

Your first week of the Disney College Program will be the longest week of your life. You are moved in, have met your roommates, and are more than ready to see the parks and begin working. But, you won’t have your cast member Blue ID until the end of the week when you go to your first training class, Disney Traditions. Instead you have all week to wish and wait for your life to begin.

In this week, you will do two or three things. You will go to Casting, which is where you will do any extra paperwork, scan your fingerprints, receive your week one training schedule, get the lowdown on the bus transportation schedule, and get checked for and informed on the Disney look (regarding hair color, style, tattoos, facial hair, piercings, glasses, etc.). You will also be required to attend a housing meeting, which is basically a class that reiterates all the information in your program guide, such as how to mail things, how to use the service center, how to deal with taking classes, no alcohol in underage apartments, no light sabers, behave, etc. Depending on your role, you may also have to attend a drug test, a swim test (for lifeguards), a body scan (for performers), or a language test (if you selected that you were bilingual on your DORMS paperwork). You will know when and where to attend all of these obligations from the itinerary that was emailed to you with your check-in time.

Other than these few things, good luck on finding things to do in your antagonizing wait to step into the freaking Magic Kingdom already. Just try to get to know people around your complex. Go to the pool, go to Disney Springs, resort hop, explore Orlando. Find things that don’t require your cast member Blue ID, which you will receive at the end of the week at …

Traditions

Finally! The day has come when you finally get to go to Disney Traditions. You’ve heard your friends talk about it all week. You’ve heard stories from the CP’s who got there before you. You’ve seen the documentation in the YouTube vlogs you’ve been shamelessly stalking. And finally, it is your time. Traditions is a class that any Disney cast member must go through before beginning work. In this class, you will hear all about the Disney mission statement and their four core values. You will receive your name tag and your Blue ID, and you will also have some other fun surprises along the way. Be prepared for the magic. You will cry. The people around you will cry. It’s just a really fun magical cryfest celebrating the start of a once in a lifetime journey.

Don’t forget that you will have to be in strict Disney look and business casual attire for this class, or you will be sent home and scheduled to come on another day. And that would just be heartbreaking because then all your friends would get to go to the parks without you, and you wouldn’t be able to start working until the next week, and you would be poor, and would cry for all the wrong reasons.

So if you’re a girl, don’t risk a skirt/dress that is too short. Boys, wear pants. Better to be too dressy than not dressy enough.

Getting into the Parks

Now, you finally have your Blue ID! Congratulations! You can now get into any Disney venue for free! (With the exception of water parks having some blockout dates). However, your Blue ID is not the same thing as your Disney Self Admission pass that you will receive a few weeks later in the mail. While you only have your Blue ID, you will have to go to Guest Relations every time you want to go to the park and they will scan your ID and make you a park ticket for that day, because they have acknowledged you are a new cast member. However, once you get your Self Admission pass mailed to you, you will just be able to walk into the park like any other guest and won’t have to deal with the Guest Relations line every time. The point is, you can’t use your Blue ID to walk into the park. You must first essentially “convert” it into a park ticket.

Transportation

The last thing I will talk about in this post is getting yourself around in the first two weeks. Walt Disney World property is vast. Each park and resort is the size of a small college campus. It is going to take a lot of time to get acclimated to directions, especially if you are a global cast member (working in all four parks). You have a few options here. You can either explore the roads before your shifts, or you can leave about an hour and a half early for your shift. If you are taking the bus, make sure you take the bus before the one you would normally take. Buses break down all the time, and they are generally slow no matter what.

Remember, not only do you have to fight through tourist traffic and potentially the park’s parking gate (depending on which direction you’re coming from), but you also have to deal with parking in a very large cast member lot, and walking all the way to your work location in the park. If you are stationed at Magic Kingdom, this process takes even longer because you have to take a shuttle from the cast parking lot to the Utilidoors.

Bear in mind that because Disney is so secretive about their backstage elements, cast entrances do not usually show up on your GPS. For instance, say you are trying to get backstage at Epcot. You can’t put Epcot into your maps, or it will take you through the guest entrance, which is very far from the cast entrance. Talk to your trainers or CPs who have gotten there before you. They will tell you which precise roads to map, that will lead you straight to cast member parking!

The point is, it is better to be early than late, safer than sorry. You only get a few chances to be late, because you will begin to rack of points on your record card, which you do not want.

You’ve Done it!

Congratulations! You are now an official Walt Disney World Cast Member! I think I will let your area trainers take over from here. I hope that my best efforts have prepared you for what you are about to experience first hand. The only way you will really know what you’re doing is by just jumping in and doing it. You should be proud of yourself for doing something so big and new. If these “How To” blogs have helped you in your journey at all, I would love to hear about your college program experience! I’m also always here for advice. I think the Disney College Program is a really brilliant way to connect with such a vast array of people, and I would be happy to get to know you! I will be back posting a little bucket list of what you should make sure to do during your time in Disney. But I will wrap up my instruction sessions here, with a nice motivational quote from our favorite:

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney

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