Resident adviser

My position as a Resident Adviser entailed supervising a floor of approximately seventy residents and guiding them with academic advice and campus resources. I was responsible for planning educational and social events for the holistic development of residents and to build a sense of community. I was also required to perform administrative duties for the residence hall. I was able to meet with my advisor who was the Community Coordinator to regularly provide updates regarding my progress and receive feedback. I chose my Community Coordinator to because I was able to closely work with them in order to achieve my goals for the experience. They provided me continued support and was my main point of contact regarding any issue that I had. I was able to spend approximately twenty hours a week for two semesters for this position. My aim was to be able to serve as a resource to help my residents achieve the best of their abilities during their tenure at university. I also wanted to be able to create a safe and comfortable environment where the residents would feel free to be themselves and share their ideas.

           I hosted programs for my active strategies where residents received more information about the issue of homelessness around Clifton and we made bags of food to hand out to persons experiencing homelessness. We were also able to host a canned food drive for St. George’s pantry and the Bearcat pantry to highlight the issue on food shortages, the people experiencing food shortages and showing how even college students suffered from these issues. I was able to use information from my Problem Pitch in my Introduction to Honors class which was a project on people experiencing homelessness around Clifton.

Oftentimes, my programs required a lot of research in advance so I could take all my researched information and filter it down to what I would present to my residents. This process really allowed me to understand the topics and issues under study really well. I was also challenged by the variety of questions my residents asked and their interests in the issues that were presented to them. It made me really focus on these issues and how our contribution could potentially change the issue at hand for the better. This experience was exceptionally important for me because it really helped my personal development and made me understand the scale of certain issues in the world through self-research. I also felt really fulfilled as I was able to gain a much more deeper understanding on certain topics and share that with my residents. I feel really grateful to be able to have the opportunity to impact my residents and influence them to take action in the positive direction. This experience will motivate me to continue to contribute as much as I can to society, continue to influence people around me and not only educate myself on issues but also to get involved as much as I can.

            I used my weekly meetings with my Community Coordinator as one of the ways to reflect as the meetings allowed me to not only think about my progress but the progress of my residents and the impact my programs have had on them. I was able to receive constructive feedback and tips on how to make a greater and more effective impact as well as how to address certain issues in an efficient way to my residents. I also kept a short summary journal after each event I hosted to be able to reflect on what could have been done to make it better for the next event.

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