With the release of Toy Story 5, and topics floating around on student loneliness, I couldn’t help but notice a connection. I remember seeing the fourth Toy Story in a drive-in and thinking “that’s it, this is the last of these amazing movies.” But the creators saw a market years later that I had never thought of. In this age, toys really do talk to kids! They’ve got IPads, and YouTube, and toys 5 year old me could never have dreamed of. Toy Story took their characters, and shifted it into a new market, with new gadgets, and a new way of life.
So what does this have to do with our college students? Well, I myself have been part of the guilty party that wants to revamp residence life to what it was pre-Covid. I want to see students come out of their shell, and expand their social bubble. In a previous role, I used to go with my students for hospital transports. One of the saddest things I discovered during this time in my life is that my students didn’t feel like they could be at a social gathering without engaging excessively in various substances.
There is comfort in being a username and not a first name and last name. There is safety in being a perfectly curated feed of your best moments, and there is a sense of control in the anonymity of our online culture. We cannot change the formation of a student and the security they feel in presenting to the world only what they want to. We can’t expect the same student who only shares their opinions on online class forums and associates their number of followers with their self-worth to then come out and automatically like our attempts at community connections.
So I encourage you, yes, let’s provide opportunities to get students out of their comfort zone, but let’s also try to meet them where they’re at. They cannot be rushed into an identity they never fully grasped, or forced to like being around people in a social setting, but they can be comforted, accepted, and given the space to figure out who they are without further pressure from the faculty and staff placed in these roles to support them.
To get us all started, I’ve created a list of small considerations for larger community impact:
Passive Programming: This can be a hot take! We all like our shiny programs that are Instagram ready and present ourselves as involved and caring staff. However, I can’t help but wonder if the urge to promote heavy active programming is a clear disregard for what our students are telling us with their actions. Let me give an example. I had an RA this year, amazing at her job, she hit every expectation and then some, but even she struggled with getting students to programs. She coordinated a craft night with one of our campus partners, bought face masks and stress toys, and advertised like crazy. Not a single person showed. We’ve all likely had an RA that this has happened to, no matter how hard they tried. Rather than giving up, she left one face mask and one stress toy outside of every one of her resident’s rooms. My RA never received much recognition from her residents for how hard she was working to build a community, because she wasn’t going along with what worked for them, she was following the expectations set up for her. Every month, that same RA started to put out an item in front of all of those resident’s doors, and those were the times where her community responded. She put out good luck ducks, little race cars, notebooks with handwritten notes inside, soda, snacks, etc. Her residents loved it! During RA Appreciation Day, she received multiple anonymous compliments on how she made her residents feel cared for because of these small tokens of connection.
Intentional Conversations: Introversion is often a buzz word in a lot of recent presentations and conversations that I’ve noticed in the residence life world. Yet, I haven’t seen much trickle down when it comes to intentional conversations. Why not make these check-ins digital? Offering residents the option to have these conversations over messaging rather than face to face allows them to engage in a way that is already familiar and comfortable to them. While some students love to talk to their RA in-person, a lot of them don’t nowadays, but we still want to check-in on them. Yes, there are many times throughout the year where we do need to see a student’s face, but in our attempts that are meant to be focused on connection and support, allowing students the opportunity to do this in a more informal way can help us to get real, authentic interactions.
Busy Hands & Close Proximity: I fully believe that students do not hide to be rude, they hide to shield themselves. With rising anxiety levels, low self-esteem, and high pressure, hiding feels good to our students. So when it does come time to bring students together, my unspoken rule in my own programming is give their hands something to do, and make it easy for them to leave if they need to. Bring your program as close as you possibly can to your students. It may not be your favorite location on campus, but it just might be the location that feels doable to them. If you’ve got students stressed about homework, they can stop by and head back to their rooms to finish up their assignments. If you’ve got anxious students, they can come feel it out and return as quickly as they want to. If you’ve got introverts, they can come for the portion that is life-giving, and leave when they need to recharge. Our connection points should be first and foremost for our students, no matter how different they are than when we ourselves were in college. For busy hands, this can be food, activities, pamphlets, anything that prevents them from standing with nothing to do but socializing. It may sound anti-community, but when you put yourself in their shoes, we have to consider how they communicate. Texting, social media, and email is comfortable for them. Having options to naturally break eye contact can help students to connect deeper. In the same way we keep stress toys in our offices to help students to relax and open up, the same mindset should be applied to our community connection points.
All of this being said, it is important to help our students learn and grow so they can be ready for life after college. However, might we consider looking at the way we build community to be a reflection of how our students feel community, and teaching them how to do so in an ever changing and digitally-based world? With our students at the forefront of our mind, I truly believe we can create communities where our students know wholeheartedly that they have a friend in us.
Rachel Caine (she/her) is currently a Community Director at Wake Forest University who graduated in 2023 with a bachelors in communications and psychology, and is now in her third year of her Masters in Clinical Counseling program. Rachel’s dream job is to work in student wellness programming while serving in a counselor role, where she can integrate her love for communication, programming, and student well-being into her work. She hopes to continue to bridge the gap between mental health and residence life. She loves animals and has a growing family of pets, including the newest member of her family “Comet” the puppy!
