Residence life and education, residential curriculum and curricular approaches, student housing, and technology.
Imagine it: You’re sitting through the eleventy-ninth candidate interview for a residence life position. You’re staring at your notes, trying to remember whether it was Candidate #14 or Candidate #17 who said their passion was “connecting with residents.” Or was it “resident connections”? Everything is blurring together. Your notes are turning into a string of... Continue Reading →
February has one of my favorite holidays of the year. It is a holiday that is, in my opinion, criminally underrated. No, I’m not talking about the lovey dovey Valentine’s Day - I’m talking about Groundhog Day. I grew up in, and still live in, Western Pennsylvania, just a stone’s throw away from the town... Continue Reading →
We know through our student educational work, whether within a curricular model or otherwise, that student learning happens with or without us. While every school has its own needs and philosophies informing their process, most schools incorporate current RAs in some part of the process. Participating in interviews on the other side of the table, so-to-speak,... Continue Reading →
The student staff hiring process looks very different today than it did just a few years ago. With each new generation of students comes new challenges and opportunities for how we recruit, interview, and select our resident assistants and other student leaders. Today’s college students live online. Their social circles, studies, and even job searches... Continue Reading →
Every year, residence life professionals enter one of the busiest (and most consequential) periods of the academic year cycle: student staff selection. Applications open, information sessions are hosted, and teams prepare to interview and evaluate dozens or even hundreds of students. The goal is clear: to identify the best possible group of student leaders to... Continue Reading →
On this episode of ResEdChat, join our host Noah Montague, and guest Mathew Perry, Resident Director at Miami University of Ohio, to talk about RA recruitment. RA recruitment is one of the biggest endeavors that any Residence Life department goes through. And naturally, there are always things that go well and things that can go better. Noah and Perry discuss tangible ways to better recruit RAs and make the processes more equitable for those in them.
In residence life, the selection of student leaders such as resident assistants (RAs) is a critical task that often requires significant time and resources. Yet, despite the rigor of these processes, much of the data collected during recruitment (particularly from interviews) remains underutilized. With a strategic shift in perspective, this data can serve as a... Continue Reading →
Hiring student staff in residence life is a critical and complex responsibility. It's a process that sits at the intersection of student development, operational success, and institutional values. As we strive to build high-performing, diverse, and resilient teams, we are continually seeking that elusive formula for success. While a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist, data-driven insights... Continue Reading →
Unionization efforts by student staff, including Resident Assistants (RAs), are becoming more common. Increasing numbers of undergraduate (and graduate) student employees are organizing for better compensation, clearer job expectations, and fairer accountability practices. You may already be seeing early signs of interest in unionization on your campus. Whether or not your student staff have initiated... Continue Reading →
When it's RA/student staff recruitment season, it's time to bring on the creativity! The following schools volunteered their recruitment materials (posters, flyers, social media images, etc.) to share. Check out these examples and get ideas for your own efforts. Michigan Tech Concordia College Moorhead, MN East Texas A&M University Examples From Other Years Texas Woman's University... Continue Reading →
In residence life, we’re constantly hiring! Every year, we launch the recruitment and selection process for student staff, exploding the outlook calendars of everyone. From marketing, to reviewing applications, facilitating interviews, and spending out offer letters–it doesn’t stop! Professional staff vacancies can pop up at any time, keeping the hiring cycle humming. Hiring new student... Continue Reading →
When it's RA/student staff recruitment season, it's time to bring on the creativity! The following schools volunteered their recruitment materials (posters, flyers, social media images, etc.) to share. Check out these examples and get ideas for your own efforts. California State University Long Beach Credit: Melanie Vo, Resident Assistant & Marketing and Social Media Student Assistant ... Continue Reading →
In an effort to provide more accessible and equitable opportunities to all student staff applicants, the Housing and Residence Life department at the University of North Texas has implemented a lottery process to recruit, select, and place student staff. This presentation will cover the department’s reasoning, methods, and assessment of the lottery process, including the ways in which this process has combated inequitable traditional hiring practices of student staff.
Like clockwork, every spring brings about Resident Assistant hiring season! It can be a hectic, but also a fun time to be in residence life. Seeing the optimism and hope of new RA candidates can be energizing, but the grind of interviewing can also be exhausting. If you get overwhelmed, take a minute to regroup... Continue Reading →
When is the last time you gave your RA or student staff evaluation process a through review? Given the myriad of responsibilities of residence life professionals, staff evaluations can be easy to overlook until the time comes for a formal review. Good residence life departmental practice, however, should involve a continuous annual review of position... Continue Reading →
Transitioning to a residential curriculum is as much about educational plan development as it is about organizational change. The reason for this is that curricular approaches are often paradigmatic change--change predicated on an entirely new set of premises. In other words, rather than just rearranging the furniture in the room, you're changing the entire room... Continue Reading →
When transitioning your residence life program to a residential curriculum model, it becomes increasingly important that you hire professional staff with the requisite skills and competencies to enact the curriculum. Although these skills are desirable in any residence life professional, they take on added importance in a residential curriculum. Some of the competencies required of staff... Continue Reading →
