by Emma Nourse

If the Registrar is the heart of an institution, Residential Life is the umbilical cord. ‘Res Life’ functions as a tether to campus, keeping students close to the action and ensuring adequate support. Recently, I have heard about a few changes that are coming to the office. Alongside those changes I have also heard some concerns, some in relation to those changes and some not, and that’s where this article comes in. 

Prior to working here at Paydirt, I was an RA. While doing research for this piece, I was able to use my prior knowledge and connections within the department to my advantage. Before I continue, I would like to state that the intention of this piece is not to target any person, group of people, or organization, but instead to accurately report on student testimonies and the inner workings of Res Life.

In talking about Res Life, I would be remiss if I did not start off the conversation with RAs. As one of the professional staff members, Matt ‘Moose’ Young, said: “The RAs truly are the connection between us and the residents.”

In order to be that connection between the ‘Pro Staff’ and students, RAs have several duties to fulfill. It is fairly well known that RAs are responsible for the well-being of their building and its residents. This is accomplished through one-on-ones, bulletin boards, programming events, and ‘rounds’ throughout their designated areas. However, this is not all the work they do.

Behind the scenes, RAs are also required to help out in the Res Life office during assigned hours, serve on committees, attend staff meetings, perform health and safety inspections, enforce and uphold community standards, and more. 

It's no secret that Covid changes everything. For RAs, the rules and regulations shift week to week and the pandemic consistently creates new duties and challenges. One of the new duties is delivering meals to those in quarantine. During the initial lockdown of Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, there was a struggle to engage with residents as everything had to be moved online. As one former RA put it, “it was incredibly defeating. I worked really hard on all of my programs only to have very few people show up.”

Covid did not only affect the workload of RAs. Res Life Assistant Director Koreen Kerfoot mentioned how “there is so much time that is taken up” in tracking vaccination statuses, test results, exposures, and ensuring that the spread of Covid is mitigated on campus. 

Which brings up another important piece of the Res Life office: the Professional Staff. The head of the office is Tyler Melvin, Director of Residential Life. Their job is to manage the two sides of the residential life program, both the housing operations and student facing, as well as directly manage the Pro Staff and indirectly manage the RAs. 

Koreen Kerfoot, as stated previously, is the Assistant Director of Residential Life. Her job is primarily focused on the operations piece “which is the housing assignments and meal plan management,” but she also works on “leadership development in terms of the RA programming model and training.” However, Koreen did mention that there are going to be changes to her job in the future.

Residential Life Coordinators Moose and Allison Colvin are directly in charge of different teams of RAs; Moose is in charge of the residence hall staff and Allison the apartments. On top of that, Allison is also responsible for the selection and training of new and current RAs. Moose handles the housing components for summer conferences here at Tech. There is also Residential Life Specialist Mari.

I mentioned that there were going to be changes to the office of Res Life. There is currently a plan to hire more Pro Staff to “pull away some of the work that is on the RAs back to the Professional Staff,” said Tyler Melvin. This shift has a two fold effect: RAs will no longer spend a large chunk of time trying to put together events, and dedicated Pro Staff members will be better equipped to plan educational, effective programs and assess  the learning outcomes. 

The RAs would still run the events, but they would be given the necessary materials and a facilitation guide to the event itself. This would be a “step-by-step guide of what to consider, what conversations to have, how to navigate things, etc,” said Melvin. This correlates to Res Life’s notion that RAs are people first, students second, and RAs third as this will “free up a lot of time [for] RAs.”

This is part of a directional shift: the office is working towards “a residential curriculum approach,” said Melvin. Res Life will be “extremely intentional about clustering students that have similar identities and similar experiences.” This will be done through the creation of ‘affinity spaces’ within the halls to enhance a sense of belonging and community on campus. 

Launching in fall, there will be a restructuring of the halls to include “first year residence halls, and second year/upperclassmen communities and residence halls,” says Melvin. Within those specific communities there will be subcommunities as well. For example, Melvin mentioned that there will now be two queer affinity spaces as opposed to just one. “We are moving away from gender neutral and gender inclusive language and concepts because all of that space is valid and needed and will stay. We are going to broaden that community to not just include trans and non-binary people but to be the entire queer community.”

One of the biggest reasons for these changes is because research suggests “students are more likely to be successful and more likely to have a higher GPA and more likely to stay on campus if they have a sense of belonging.” Later down the line there will be a requirement that first year students live on campus as research shows that when they do live on campus they are “30% more likely to be retained,” said Melvin. I was informed by both Koreen and Melvin that this will have to wait until West Hall comes back online.

There will also be changes to management of the Mountain Springs and Desert Willow Apartments. They will be handed over to Auxiliary Services: “the thought is to treat them more like apartment living and more independent living,” said Koreen. It was emphasized by Melvin that they “are having the exact same spaces that [they] had this year and the year before, there is not going to be an occupancy concern.”

One of the biggest concerns people across the board had when talking about Res Life was communication. This has been echoed throughout the majority of my interviews, on a student and faculty level.

On a student level, one person said “if Residential Life is going to make [a lot] of changes, they should make an effort to explain the changes to the general public.” It was also mentioned in some interviews that RAs had felt as though they were not properly informed about changes that were occurring, and that they didn’t have a voice in the changes before they happened. For example, one RA commented that had the RAs had the chance to talk to Prostaff about the updates to the RA duties this semester, “people would have been more agreeable to them, and [they] feel like some of [the changes] might not have even gone through.”

RAs also mentioned how they felt general communication in the office was ineffective. One former RA said that “information was not being handed down quickly enough,” and that led to a lack of clarity. One of the examples given was that an RA could be told something Monday, then by Wednesday the information could have completely changed. On the Prostaff level, Tyler Melvin said they felt “there is a disconnect between Pro Staff and RA staff [regarding] what students need.” 

One of the other concerns shared by interviewed RAs was the large workload. A few RAs, both current and former, felt as though they did more work than they were originally told they would have to. “We feel like we are doing a lot more than 20 hours,” one RA said. Some also mentioned that with meetings, rounds, and other administrative work they do, they only have around a few hours a week to plan programs, make bulletin boards, and do other general RA duties. While it is possible to only work the contracted hours, it does come at the cost of the quality, as one past RA said: “Res Life requires much more than 20 hours a week to do things well.”

One cannot talk about the work without the pay. Here at Tech, RAs are given a stipend that first goes towards their Room and Board, with the excess going straight to their pockets. A former RA said: “[I] was paid very little for the amount of work that I did.” Another person said: “when I became an RA, I didn’t realize I was losing money as quickly as I was.”

However, not all concerns about Res Life were about the RA position and communication. There was a general theme of concerns regarding how Res Life handled situations with residents. For example, one person who was interviewed talked about how they “had a really bad time with roommates” to the point they were “feeling unsafe.” This person detailed their attempts to follow the proper channels to solve the issue, including in-person meetings and roommate mediation, however, they felt that Res Life “did not handle the situation correctly and that [Res Life] was not being accommodating.”

A situation that was brought up by another person was in regards to a potential new roommate that they were extremely uncomfortable with. They and their current roommates went to talk to a member of Pro Staff about their concerns, and they were “accused of being bigoted towards neurodivergant people and unnaccepting towards [the potential roommate.]” Although the individual stated that they received genuine support from a few members of the Pro Staff, they also felt that the “experience was very negative overall. Every moment was a battle, every discussion that [they] had with Residential Life was something [they] had to fight for. [They] were often talked over when [they] shouldn’t have been.” 

How can these concerns be addressed? Starting with communication between RAs and Pro Staff, a suggestion from one RA was to form an “RA expectations and guidelines committee,” with a focus on effective, direct communication between RAs and Pro Staff regarding potential changes. This would be a way for RAs to stay informed on and involved in the way Res Life runs. Director Melvin said that they “want RAs to be included in the decision making process,” and that they have taken steps to involve the RAs in some of those conversations.

An option for better office to student communication is to hold a student forum where the student body could come and ask questions regarding policy changes and other unclear information. This idea came from a former RA where they discussed how “when Tech offices tend to make a large amount of changes in a short period of time, there’s typically some type of [student] forum.”

A possible issue with the student forum idea that is brought up by Koreen Kerfoot is that before Res Life can talk to students there is the “matter of wanting to make sure that [Res Life] can answer [students] questions” accurately and without having to backtrack later. They want to have “the details worked out so that [they] can communicate those pieces” effectively. 

It is also important to remember that there are several new employees both on the Pro Staff and here at Tech that need to find their groove. As Koreen states “some of it is with a new VP [of Student Life] and a new director that [Res Life] is doing a lot of reevaluation in terms of where priorities are and what [Res Life] is doing and how can [Res Life] meet the needs of students as well as the needs of the institution.” It was also mentioned that this can create philosophical differences in their priorities of “what students are learning and coming out with.”

While earlier in this piece I did mention how one of the major time constraints on RAs - program planning - is going to be pulled back to the Prostaff level, other possible changes to the workload of RAs were suggested. One of those was to better streamline how Covid fits into the RA job: “An area of growth for Res Life is if Covid is not going anywhere, it needs to be considered a new normal and if it’s a new normal, how can we better support our RAs in still doing Covid things but still having a life outside of their RA role,” said Melvin. Some things have already changed, such as providing a car for off campus meal deliveries and ensuring that no one RA needs to deliver all of them alone. 

Another aspect of the workload that is currently being reduced is the bulletin boards. While the number of boards that need to be completed have gone up by one, for the first and last boards of the semester, “RAs are given all of the information [for opening and closing], they just need to put it up,” said Kerfoot. 

In addition to the changes to the bulletin boards and programming, there is also going to be a shift in how the RA positions function in the residence halls versus apartments. In an apartment community “build community differently and interact with students differently and [resident] needs are different, so [Res Life is] going to be more intentional so that [Res Life] can address those differences versus trying a one size fits all method,” said Koreen.

It has been suggested that in order to help with the high turnover rate, Res Life should raise the pay of their RAs. One person said the current pay after room and board is deducted “is not worth it.” While there has been a recent raise to the RA pay at the state level, raising the pay anymore is not possible at the moment without increasing housing rates to match: “In order to pay RAs more we have to charge residents more. [Pro Staff] knows [being an RA] is a lot of work and that [RAs] deserve compensation,” said Koreen.

There is also a push to allow RAs to pursue paid research alongside working for Res Life to help with the RA turnover rate. According to the Director of Res Life, in the past two semesters 8 RAs have left to pursue research. As Melvin says the policy “inhibits student success,” and if an individual has the “ability and time management skills to do paid research and serve as an RA, they should be afforded the opportunity.” 

In looking at the concerns with respect to the handling of the resident situations, both people had suggestions for how they would have liked the events to have been handled. One person said they “would have preferred [that Res Life had] handled it on a flexible timeline.” The other student said that they would have liked to have “been informed sooner about the possible solutions about [their] living situation.”

Before the end of this article, I would also like to touch on some of the positive aspects that I heard in the interviews. One of the RAs I interviewed talked about how they enjoyed being a “big brother” to their residents. A few others also mentioned how they enjoy interacting with their residents as well. Allison Colvin talked about how Techies are her “kind of people” when asked why she stayed.

One anecdote from a current RA was that they were sitting alone in Chartwells and one of the Pro Staff came up and invited the RA to sit with them. The RA said that they had been having a hard time and that had made them feel better. Another RA mentioned how they felt supported by Pro Staff during an exchange in the Res Life Discord where a resident was being rude to the RAs in chat where Tyler came in and defended the RAs to the resident in question.

Circling back to the main topic of the article, Moose said: “[We] can always get better. We can always do a better job of finding and addressing the needs of our residents.” That was a general theme throughout the interviews with the Pro Staff as well, that they are actively looking for ways in which they can improve how they serve the needs of the students in their facilities and their RAs.

The proposed solutions to the concerns listed above will take time and patience. If you would like to get in contact with Res Life to learn about how these changes are proceeding or if you would like to bring up your own concerns, contact Res Life on the second floor of Fidel or at residential_life@nmt.edu. As Koreen said, “if you have questions, just ask.”