In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, host Paul sits down with a member of the Roompact Blog Cohort, Matthew Inman, to discuss a wide range of topics from focusing on students’ socio emotional learning to Pizza Hut (yes, Pizza Hut). As a recently graduated Masters degree student from Clemson University, Matthew also reflects on lessons learned and gives advice for incoming graduate students as well as those transitioning to a first time professional role.
Guest: Matthew Inman
Host: Paul Gordon Brown
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Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, the podcast where we talk to residence life professionals who are just doing cool things out in the field and kind of spitball about what we think is happening next. And today, I’m really excited because we have one of our blog cohort members. Matthew Inman is joining us today to talk a little bit about transitions and how things change over time. So how are you doing, Matthew? How’s your day going?
Matthew Inman:
I’m doing great, Paul. Thanks for having me on the podcast here. It’s a wonderful morning here in Southeast Kansas where I’m recording this now. But looking forward to our chat today. Thank you.
Paul Brown:
Excellent, excellent. I’ve been to Kansas a few times. Wichita would probably be the closest, I think, to where you’re located. For anyone going to Wichita, please see the very first Pizza Hut. It is on the Wichita State University campus. It’s very cool. It’s very tiny.
Matthew Inman:
Yes. Yes, it is. Yes, by the Carney brothers. Yes.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Have you ever been to the little museum original shop that they have set up?
Matthew Inman:
I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve been to Wichita plenty of times, but I’ve never actually gone to the original Pizza Hut, which I know is one of our few claims to fame from the Sunflower State. That, Dorothy, and Hallmark Cards, I think. But yeah, I have very fond memories of going to our local Pizza Hut in a little town called Chanute, Kansas, doing the BOOK IT! program. Enjoyed the pan pizza when I was a kid.
Paul Brown:
Do they have the classic one? Do you know what I’m talking about? They brought back some of the original with the original decor and they’re called Classic Pizza Huts. Have you been?
Matthew Inman:
Yes, I think so. Yes. I remember the Classic Pizza Huts with the red plastic cups that I’m-
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Inman:
… very nostalgic for too. My mom has some at the house here, and I always drink my soda out of them, because you just get that good nostalgic kick.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. It’s a whole thing now, that they’re bringing them back and they’re designed classically, and I have not yet been back to one, so got to make that a priority. But anyways, enough about Pizza Hut and Wichita and all that. I mean, we can still talk about Kansas and things like that.
But we always like to have the blog cohort members on the show, just because y’all bring a lot of diverse perspectives. And for you, one of the things in thinking about what we might talk about today is I know you just went through your graduate, your master’s experience in student affairs work at Clemson, where the wonderful Tony Cawthon presides. Wonderful human being, if people don’t know about Tony. But what got you into Clemson and how did that come about? Give us a little bit of your bio and tell us what got you to Clemson, and then we’ll talk about where you’re going next.
Matthew Inman:
Yes, absolutely. So one thing I want to share with folks when they’re asking me about my story and my journey, home for me is a small family farm in Southeast Kansas. That’s actually where I’m joining you all today, actually, right now. And I’m the proud son of a seventh-generation Kansas farmer.
Paul Brown:
Wow.
Matthew Inman:
Going to college was never a foregone conclusion for my family. I went to a very small public high school about 18 miles away from where I am right now, where I’m recording this right now. About 170 students total. There were 36 students in my graduating class in high school, just to give you a sense of the scale. So none of my parents attended college, really. But they were very much the first people in my family to say, “You will go to college. You will get a degree.” So now, I’m very thankfully, I guess, technically the fourth person to have a undergraduate degree, the third person in our family to have a graduate degree thus far in our family.
But I did my undergraduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, the Harvard of the Midwest, as I like to call it, where you do all the wonderful things that eventually get you into this line of work. Got my start in the Residence Hall Association at WashU, where I met the wonderful Jordan Williams. I know you know Jordan, Paul, a little bit. She was my introduction into student affairs and that actually being a really good career, and she’s the person that steered me towards Tiger Town in Clemson, South Carolina.
Did my assistantship there in the University Housing and Dining Department, specifically residential learning. Tony W. Cawthon was my faculty advisor. And so, I’ve been, I guess, now doing this for about six years roughly, if you think about it, between the time of being an undergrad student, doing my graduate work, and now heading on to bigger and brighter horizons, which I know we’ll talk a little bit later, in Big Sky Country.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. No, that’s amazing. You’ve had some really great people around you between Jordan and then Tony, who I could gush about forever, who’s a great mentor and just a nice human being, a really nice human being. That’s interesting. I didn’t know about your background growing up on a farm, and a multi-generation farm at that. Gosh. Was college a big adjustment for you or did you take to it? I mean, going from a high school class-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… of 36 in a rural farming community to WashU at St. Louis-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… that’s not a small jump.
Matthew Inman:
No, it was not, not at all. I think the important thing to give more further context about how I even got to WashU in the first place is when I was a senior in high school, I got the National QuestBridge College Match Scholarship. That’s how I got to WashU. I remember the day I got the acceptance letter, the scholarship, you see the price tag for an institution like WashU, over four years, it was $320,000 at that time. I think it’s gone up now, thankfully. Or not thankfully, honestly. But that’s a lot of money for a kid that grew up on a farm in Southeast Kansas. That’s a lot of money that can actually take care of you for a very long time.
So I know I had 36 in my graduating class. When I went to WashU, my first year was in the fall of 2020, to give you actually further context. I actually went to campus in the fall of 2020, and so everything was single occupancy in the residence hall. I did not have a roommate. I did not have that typical first-year college experience that the brochures and the pictures tell you about. But there was still more people on my dorm floor than were in my hometown in my graduating class even, and it was quite an adjustment. You’re four and a half hours away from home. You don’t know anybody. You’re told to stay in your room, to take your temperature every day, to see if you have an infection or not. It’s definitely not the things that you think about when you’re going to college for the first time.
But I think thinking about that experience is really what made me actually more so drawn to this work, actually. The absence of that community and being able to have people to just talk to. On a Zoom call right now… My only main connection to anybody at Washington my first year was a peer mentor that I had that talked to me once a week on a Zoom call. I was on campus. I didn’t know where the heck they were. They were not on campus, but they were doing their year virtually at that time. Having someone to talk to, that had a little bit of an idea about what it was like to come from my background, to navigate that institution, very much instilled me the power, the conversations that we can have with students. Actually, I think, if you think about what was the thing that first took me on this path, it was that experience, actually.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I have a theory that people become RAs, and then maybe, ultimately, residence life professionals based on one thing. They had a horrible RA or they had an amazing RA. A horrible RA and I want to be the RA that my RA wasn’t, or an amazing RA and I want to be just like them, or maybe there’s a slight COVID twist to it of RA absent maybe, not necessarily their fault, and therefore you want to do that thing. I always feel like whenever I would interview RAs or whenever I would talk about residence life with residence life professionals, it always seems like that was some kind of motivation, a primary one, goes back to their experiences in residence life. Well, you liked it enough that you did it again at Clemson.
Matthew Inman:
Yes, I did.
Paul Brown:
I think you worked a lot with their model. Is that right? What kind of work did you do with that there?
Matthew Inman:
Yes. So my assistantship was mainly focused on the design, implementation, and assessment to Clemson’s residential curriculum, the residential experience model they call it there. So working on things about designing our learning outcomes, assessing our learning goals, and then creating all the assessment reports that go along with that.
So I know when we talk a lot about curricular work, it’s 20,000-foot level. You’re looking at the entire residential population, not just a single community. And so as someone coming from a background, being an RA, having a lot of hands-on student work, that was even an adjustment in itself, going from being on the ground, for lack of a better term, to being in essentially a command center, trying to command troops on a battlefield and not having direct experience anymore.
But as I was navigating that situation, it also reminded me it’s important to be intentional, and even when you’re looking at that 20,000-foot level to find those opportunities to connect with students, connect with community staff, to have the conversations about what’s going on on the ground. And as I had those conversations, I learned a little bit more about what are some things that we can do to tweak our curriculum to work better, to fit the students that we’re actually working with day-to-day. What are the lessons that we want them to be learning, but we actually don’t have that design in our curriculum yet?
I know during my tenure at Clemson University, there was a lot of conversations about how our student population was evolving, coming from the social media era, the TikTok era, to even very significant changes on the Clemson University campus now. Going into this fall, it’s going to be their first year without students being able to have motor vehicles on campus for most first-year students. That’s an unprecedented shift for Clemson University. I know that’s pretty typical at most universities across the campus, but talk about very much a big paradigm shift. About how do we be intentional about providing communities for students in the residence hall when they can’t easily access it as they were able to before in the local area, or being close to more friends in their local area as well?
Paul Brown:
Yeah. You’re hitting on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in terms of I do know there’s institutions that struggle with curricular approaches, so much so that they think they need to do something else, that they can’t utilize educational design in the work that they do. I mean, I recognize that that is hard for some residence life departments.
But I also think that part of what you mentioned, changing student populations and their needs and things like that, and I think one of the things I’ve started to think a lot about is adjusting learning goals, outcomes to be more social-oriented, more relationship-oriented, how are you connecting, things like that. I feel like that is one of the main thrusts that I think I’m seeing in the current generation, is a need for a higher level of social experiences, things like that-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… which may be straight-up community, et cetera. But also, I think there’s ways to frame that in a learning community kind of way.
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
What were some of the things that maybe you were thinking about? And we’re looking at all this data, and you’re like… Not necessarily about Clemson, but maybe as a whole, what went through your mind or what was the water cooler talk when you were getting a little nerdy with folks?
Matthew Inman:
Yes. So the thing that stands out to me, similar to what you were talking about, social connection elements with students. When I was at WashU, I studied education. I was educational studies, but I basically took every class that a teacher ed candidate took, I just didn’t get licensed at the end of it. And you spend a lot of time when you’re talking about pedagogy, you’re talking about interactions with primary and secondary school students, you talk a lot about social and emotional learning, and there’s oftentimes state standards for social and emotional learning. But when we get students to a college campus, we stop talking about social and emotional learning, and I think there’s no better time, or actually more important time for us to be thinking about those things.
When you have someone who’s from South Carolina and someone who’s from Washington sharing a residence hall room together for the very first time, probably two very different value sets, but they’re having to share space, they’re having to have simple conversations about expectations. Are we going to be loud? Are we going to have the lights on? But even beyond the simple things that you might have in our roommate agreement process about well… The thing that I saw a lot of Clemson and we were talking a lot about is, well, how do we have them navigate conflict in a positive, productive manner?
And we went back, we were talking during the end of my first year at Clemson University, we were going through a revision process. And I remember sitting in a very small conference room in one of our residence halls with my undergrad intern that I was supervising at the time. And then, we were looking at our outcomes, we were looking at our learning goals. One of our goals was living in community, so about the connection elements, and we were looking at the outcomes of that. And there was one about addressing negative behaviors in the community, there was one about being a positive presence, but there wasn’t one about friendships and connections and relationships.
Paul Brown:
Yeah.
Matthew Inman:
We didn’t talk about that at all. What does it look like to identify what a positive relationship looks like? What does an unhealthy relationship look like? What does it look like to then curate mutually beneficial relationships with students is what our final outcome was of that structure. And the answer is it’s hard, especially with the student populations that we have coming in today.
I know there’s a big push to focus on social connection, and I think it’s very important that we build that foundation, because without that foundation, we can’t reach those more aspirational goals, like Clemson was talking about, personal values, about exploring intellectual curiosities, being a global citizen. All those are built on a foundation of basic connection and understanding, but through a lens where you can see those others embedded in that as well. Understanding your own values, understanding your own curiosities, what does it mean to be a person in a larger society? I think if you don’t get the basic foundations about those human connections, good, bad, ugly, and everywhere in between, because that’s part of the learning process as well, it makes it more difficult to achieve those more aspirational outcomes, and almost to a certain degree, if you don’t get it right there, you’re almost chasing your tail throughout the rest of the process.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Kind of almost that classic Maslow’s hierarchy of, hey, if we’re going to move on to… I was on the faculty of the Institute on the Curricular Approach for a number of years, and I think one of the things, if I could go back in time and change some of the things that we constructed when we constructed the curriculum for the institute experience was… I don’t think any of the institute faculty would disagree that the relationships and all those kinds of pieces were not important. They would say, “Yes, those are important.” But I think the curriculum institute kind of said, “Well, we assume that that’s going on, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to talk about this part and not delve into that part.”
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
And I think to bring people along on that journey, especially people that were approaching it for the first time, it would’ve been more beneficial to say, “Let’s talk about how you set up your environment. Let’s talk about what kinds of outcomes need to be happening in order for a curriculum to be successful, or in order to reach,” as you said, “aspirational goals, what are those things?” We talked about rubrics and scaffolding and how do you move that. But I feel like, especially for residence life professionals, because that is such a core of the work, I felt like we should have attended to that more, mentioned it more-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… highlighted it more. But I think instead, it was kind of like an omission, only because it was assumed, “Well, yes, do that. That’s not what we’re talking about here at the institute, so just do that, but we’re going to talk about this.” I think that was always a little bit of a mismatch.
Matthew Inman:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head there, Paul, you were talking about assumptions. I think the importance when it comes to thinking about things through a design lens, through a curricular lens is you have to be willing to question your assumptions. Oftentimes, probably the thing that’s not going well is the thing that you’re not spending the time thinking about, and I think that was definitely the case during my time at Clemson as well. And how do you ask the really hard questions and deal with the uncomfortable things as well?
Because I think the thing that also goes along with it as well, we can talk about our interactions with students all day long. What are our goals? What are our outcomes for students? How do we want staff to treat students? How do we want them to engage with students? But the thing I experienced during my graduate experience is that we oftentimes had one set of criterion for how we were supposed to be interacting with students that didn’t necessarily translate to how we were supposed to be interacting with our fellow staff members in our own department.
Paul Brown:
Fascinating.
Matthew Inman:
So it’s like, why do we have two different sets of standards, where they’re like, we’re supposed to be very intentional, very positive with our students on this side of the equation, but it wasn’t always that case on the other side. And of course, that comes with assumptions. It comes with assumptions like, well, of course everything’s fine, everything’s dandy. But when was the last time someone asked, “Well, actually, how are things actually going? How do people actually feel?” I think it goes both ways. And I think asking that tough question about, “What are we not thinking about? What’s going on?” Is really important to know, for lack of a better term, be on your toes in this kind of work.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you kind of hinted at that. I want to talk to you about your transition from graduate school to first-time professional job, because that was actually what you wrote about very recently on the blog, and I know that we’re going to be dropping this episode sometime in August, so there’s going to be folks probably beginning their graduate experience, just getting on campus, things like that. But one of the things that you wrote in there was talking about… One of the things you learned was take command of your own professional development, because that is not always going to be provided up to you-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… on a platter and be like, “Oh, here it is, all laid out for you. There you go.” I mean, I think that also hits at what you’re talking about in terms of how do we interact with each other, what kind of organizational cultures are we building, things like that. And they’re not always going to be a perfectly developmental experience, even as a staff member seeking professional development and things like that.
Matthew Inman:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s never handed to you on a silver platter. You enter with a lot of expectations, assumptions about what a graduate school experience will be like. And I know probably compared to some of my graduate peers that I graduated with, my undergrad experience was very different from a lot of theirs. I was expecting to come into grad school, especially coming from an institution like WashU, very academically rigorous, very research-heavy, you’d come into grad school, you’d be like the stereotype, “Oh my gosh, I’m stressed out. I have four chapters of readings, five chapters of reading to do. I have lab hours I’ve got to get to next week, and then I’ve got to write a thesis.” Well, I went to Clemson, and that necessarily wasn’t the case, per se. That’s a pro and a con, depending on what you’re looking for in that experience.
But I think when I think back about my own experience, it’s also about how are we having conversations with our graduate staff, and I would even probably extend it to our early professional career folks as well. What do you want to be doing two years from now, three years from now, four years, five years from now, and then how do we be a little bit more intentional about that and about providing opportunities as best we can? Because it’s no secret, most institutions across the nation right now, they’re facing financial struggles and budgetary fiscal struggles right now, and that can really put a dampener on things. But how do you embed those learning moments, just as we’re trying to do with our students, in those everyday interactions?
My supervisor for my assistantship, it was like, “Well, here’s a reading that I brought to our one-on-one, let’s talk about, that I thought was interesting.” Those things ranged from a Chronicle of Higher Education article to a journal article from the ACUHO-I Journal. Now, a whole bunch of different things. Sometimes it was just an NPR article or a podcast or something like that. What do you want to do in the future? What are you curious about? And then how do you find things that speak to those topics and those themes that might be low cost, no cost, or beg, borrow, and steal, as we like to say a lot in this business as well.
There’s a plethora of free things that are out there, from videos, webinars, podcasts, books. I cannot recommend to any graduate student enough, go make friends at the library. Get to know your subject librarian, because one, they’re really cool people. But two, if someone’s going to help you find something for free or no cost, it’s going to be your university librarian.
Paul Brown:
Yeah.
Matthew Inman:
Hands down. And if your university library doesn’t have access to it, well… And also, in my experience, and Tony would be the first one to agree with me here, university librarians like to listen to students a lot more than they like to listen to faculty members. And so don’t be afraid to ask somebody in the library, “Hey, could we get this article? Could we get this book? Could we get this subscription to this thing?” Because the amount of times that I asked for something from the university library at Clemson and I got it, nine times out of 10, I got it within three days, which shocked me, especially in these fiscal class we’re talking about, where we didn’t have money to do this and that and some retreats and such, but we’ve still got money to give people opportunities to learn. So I would say don’t be afraid to ask and don’t be afraid to seek out those opportunities under any possible rock that you think they might exist.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. No, I think part of that… I mean, you mentioned also the clarity of goals. For a number of years, we offered an ACUHO-I internship, so I would be interacting with a lot of graduate students, and one of the very first questions, “What are your goals for this internship? What do you want to get out of it?” And I found a lot of folks struggled to answer that question. And to me, it was probably one of the more important ones, because I was like, “Well, I want to know if we can deliver on the things that you want us to. I can provide experiences if maybe…” And maybe your goals aren’t perfect because you don’t totally understand what the work is yet, so you can’t formulate that. But spending some time saying, “Well, what is it that I want to learn?” Or even, “I’m not sure because I’ve not been in it long enough yet to be able to do it.”
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
That is, in and of itself, some kind of goal. I think it just helps with that motivation to go out there and create your own. That, I think, was my experience also in graduate work as well.
Matthew Inman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Brown:
But now, you’re through that, you’re moving on, you’re moving on to Montana. Tell us about that. So what’s this job you’ve got?
Matthew Inman:
Yes. So I’ll be starting as a community director at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, Blue Sky Country.
Paul Brown:
I mean, Montana does not have a lot of schools, so there’s not that many positions, so it’s not very common-
Matthew Inman:
No.
Paul Brown:
… that I hear someone head to Montana, and you’re zigzagging from Kansas to Missouri to South Carolina, now over to Montana.
Matthew Inman:
Yes. So there’s not an easy way to explain how I got to Montana, actually. The simple answer is my first criteria when I was going for the job search as I was approaching graduation… We talk a lot, like, “Oh, what are you wants? What are your needs?”
Paul Brown:
Right.
Matthew Inman:
“What do you need?” And I was like, “Well, one, I want a job. Two, I would like to be in a functional area that I kind of like. And three, more so than one and two probably, is I would like to be in a different part of my country than I have been before.” And so you’re trolling the job boards, and I came across the posting from the University of Montana. I’d be like, “Well, I can go work at Montana. That seems pretty cool.”
Paul Brown:
Beautiful state.
Matthew Inman:
Beautiful country. I’m sure by the time this episode comes out, if anyone sees me in person, I’ll actually be able to actually fully attest to it, that probably the pictures actually do do it justice. But the opportunity to explore new areas of the country, I think, is something I couldn’t pass up.
But I think the thing also, we talk a lot about the pandemic and the way the pandemic is affecting universities and colleges and students, I think, actually, to a degree, I think as we’re talking right now over Zoom, how commonplace that has become now-
Paul Brown:
Yeah.
Matthew Inman:
…. where Montana ran their entire process virtually. I didn’t have to travel to Missoula to go interview. I actually did my final round interview with Montana in a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona on spring break. So hey, I still got the job. So I think that’s the thing that is the advantage that’s come with that as well. But I’m looking forward to the adventure, to seeing new places, new sights, meeting new people, and more so also seeing how a different institution does different things.
Paul Brown:
It’s good. You’re going to love it. It’s beautiful. I mean, at least that part of it. I can’t speak to University of Montana, but I think on that front, you’ll look good. You’ve got me thinking, I was like, who do I know? So Mikal Kenfield, M-I-K-A-L. Do you know her at all? Have you interacted with her?
Matthew Inman:
I don’t think I know her, no.
Paul Brown:
So she’s the associate dean of students and director of community standards. I know because I just looked it up. Connect with her. So if you’re going to direct your own learning while at Montana, connect with Mikal. She’s incredibly funny, so she’s wonderful in that regard. But she was formerly at Concordia College in Minnesota, did a lot with curricular approaches, so you can jive on that. But she’s a really quality professional, and I know that she just recently went there, is enjoying herself. So if that’s the preview of what you have to come, you’re going to be in a good place.
Matthew Inman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Brown:
So how are you gearing up for the move?
Matthew Inman:
First and foremost, taking a lot of time off.
Paul Brown:
Good.
Matthew Inman:
Not doing things. But that being said too, using some of the downtime to work on things that are interesting me right now. My last semester at Clemson, I worked on an independent study project, so working on maybe possibly translating that into a magazine article to publish somewhere else. So getting me some hot, fresh research on curricular approaches and organizational components that go along with that in the presses and through vocabulary of our scholarship.
But also too, taking time to enjoy nature, slowing down. But also taking time to learn about Montana and Missoula, doing the deep dive on things, like what’s in the news in Montana right now. I think just as I was leaving Clemson, Clemson, when this comes out, now is probably having their new president start actually. Montana’s actually in the same place as well. And actually, Tony knows the incoming president in Montana, actually a former student affairs professional as well. I’m now embarrassingly forgetting his name off the top of my head.
But learning what’s going on in the campus. We talk a lot about, during the job search, look about values, priorities, missions, strategic plans. I think that also doubly starts a lot when you’re entering the new pool of a new institution. We talk a lot about how we want to encourage our students to be open-minded, growth mindset going into new experiences when they come onto our campuses. That’s very much something that I’m trying to practice as well. And thinking a lot about a lot of introspection to myself too. I shared this with the search committee in that final round interview in Flagstaff, Arizona in a motel room. It’s been a little bit since I’ve been in a duty rotation, since I’ve had to answer a phone at 3:00 in the morning.
Paul Brown:
Right.
Matthew Inman:
What is it going to look like when that first happens? What are the boundaries that I’m going to have about when I’m interacting with student staff and fellow professional staff too in those late night hours and times of need or urgency as well? What does the supervising relationship look like? From my experience so far, I’ve only supervised one student employee. Now, I’m going to be supervising six to 12, so how do I, for lack of a better term, share my love and affection with all the students instead of just one? How do I do that equitably and sincerely? But also, keeping in mind students’ unique strengths and their unique needs and what they actually want out of that interaction as well, because that also differs from student to student. So a lot of practicing introspection, reflection, sitting in the garden and just seeing what comes to me.
Paul Brown:
I feel like that is what you do, right? You seem like a very reflective… I mean, all of your articles even so far have been like, okay, I know who this Matthew is. He’s thoughtful. He thinks things through deeply. There’s lots of things moving on in that brain at any given time. It’s kind of nice that you have that space to do that a little bit before jumping right in-
Matthew Inman:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
… rather than going from one job to the next, where some people have a week.
Matthew Inman:
Yes, yes, absolutely. When I started at Clemson, I graduated May 15th in St. Louis, I went home for a week and a half, and then I drove to South Carolina and started June 1. Two weeks, that was quite a whiplash. And I know graduate peers of mine that we graduated May 8th and they were starting a job May 13th. Talk about crazy whiplash.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Thankful I haven’t had to do that recently, or maybe ever again in my life. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Matthew. I really appreciate it. I hope folks gained some insights from your experience, especially those of you who may be graduate students starting off your path this fall, or new professionals starting off their new job. We’re all here. You’re not alone. So I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, and we’ll see you later, y’all.
