The Art of Making Mistakes

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. - Oscar Wilde

    Because I am a Graduate Assistant, this blog is sometimes as much about learning to navigate a position with greater responsibility as it is about Student Affairs.  Today's post is no exception.  In the past few months, I have made some mistakes.  Gasp!  It is not quite surprising - with more responsibility comes more mistake-making potential.  Some of these have been larger than others, and a variety of people have been affected  by each, from students to employees to my supervisor.

     What each of these mistakes have had in common, though, are two moments.  One is a moment of realization of the mistake.  The "Whoops" or "Uh-oh" moment, if you will.  Depending on the scope, a feeling of panic may accompany this realization - a split-second of fight-or-flight in which the short distance from my office to the airport seems short enough to sprint.  Luckily, that feeling subsides, and I have always made it through to acceptance that I messed up.

     The second moment is more important and the central takeaway from this post.  This is where you begin working towards a solution.  In some cases, you may be able to do this on your own.  Being able to solve a problem, or at least plan a solution to implement, is an important skill and shows a heightened sense of responsibility.  If you are able to do this, you will going to your supervisor with more than "I made a mistake," you will be walking into hir office with "I made a mistake, and here's what I plan to do to fix it."  This brings up another simple, yet important point - you need to tell others about the mistake!  Consider who needs to know and who should know (i.e., your supervisor will almost always be in at least the latter group, even if it only affects your direct reports).

     Envisioning a solution and telling stakeholders about a mistake may seem over-simplistic.  But coming from undergraduate, student staff positions, where most mistakes are smaller in scope and had easy solutions with few consequences, making your first mistakes in an entry-level position can be scary, if not paralyzing (helps combat the "flight").  Being the only "professional" staff member in this building, though, has been a great experience for many reasons, not the least of which is having the chance to solve the problems I create.  Not that I advocate for making mistakes; I advocate instead for learning more from mistakes than how to avoid them in the future.  Learn how to address them when they occur.  

What are your thoughts on getting back up after realizing a mistake?

Quote Citation:
Wilde, O. (n.d.). Goodreads. Retrieved from http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/799160-experience-is-simply-the-name-we-give-our-mistakes 

Photo By Me - a couple of birds in the airport!  Choose fight, not flight, at that realization step :)

New Semester, New Goals

"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." - Francis of Assisi

Happy New Year, Everyone!  The blog is back!

I realized rather slowly last semester that I was in over my head in this endeavor.  I barely had time to tell my wife about my day, much reflect on it with you all.  So now, after being rejuvenated by a relaxing winter break with my family, I am setting out to do one post per week on Mondays.  As always, thank you for understanding and reading!

I believe a good way to start the new semester would be to set some professional goals for now through May.  I have had the chance to think back on last semester and want to reach for developing in the following ten areas.    Hopefully some may be general enough that other new professionals can relate, or at least consider where they can be analogous to their own positions:

1. Ask for more feedback - I have yet to figure out why, but I find myself consistently wondering if I am doing things well or doing enough in my position.  I think some of the time I spend wondering would be better spent this semester by actually asking someone who will have an answer.
2. Plan and implement a campus-wide program with the Hall staff - We have started to think about it and are excited to make it happen.  This will be a grand test in the action of following-through!
3. Assess some initiatives within the hall - There is a lot that we do that we assume is working.  It is about time that I actually talk to some residents about what they think works and doesn't work.
4. Create more space for academic success - I discovered at the end of last semester that many more residents than we thought were struggling with academics.  We can always do more, so it is time to rethink how we incorporate our Faculty Fellow, intentionally discuss classes, and create a space for students to be first and foremost academically successful.
5. Be a more approachable and intentional supervisor - Again, there is always more to be done, and facilitating the professional development of RAs to me is one of the most important areas of my position.
6. Reflect more on how students manage conflict and how to facilitate this - I plan to discuss this in depth with the RAs I supervise during our winter training; it is an area in which I have become very interested, and I believe helping students manage conflict became a much larger role last semester than I had expected.
7. Gain a sense of my professional network / reconnect - I did not realize how quickly a professional network grows in this field, and before I even thought of how to best network I had more connections than I could track in my head.  I need to at least start a list before it grows beyond my reach.
8. Be more present with advising - I have had the chance to reflect with some mentors on advising and realize that my approach could be less hands-off.  Redefining my role with Hall Council is one of my primary goals this semester.
9. Give more time to one-on-one conversations - Within a conversation with a student I (ideally) have a captive audience.  I need to appreciate this more, capitalize on these moments, and have the conversations I can have with those students.
10. Continue to bring theory into practice - My cohort is finally studying student development theory this semester, and I am excited to apply this to my work.

There you go!  What do you think of these goals?  What do you plan to work on this semester?

Quote Citation:

Francis of Assisi. (n.d.). BrainyQuote. Retrieved from http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/francisofa121023.html 

Photo By: Me :)

The Professional Development of a Graduate Student

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas A. Edison

     One of my first meetings with my supervisor and team involved a discussion on expectations, and one of those expectations of my supervisor was that we seek out professional development opportunities beyond attendance at conferences.  It being my second week on the job, and thus second week even working this school, I had no clue how I would meet that expectation and only slightly more of a clue what professional development even was.  The way I saw it, every day of training was professional development for me being new to the field.

     But once we left RA training and began to settle into a routine, I started to realize just what my supervisor expected.  Yes, I am already registered for a professional conference, but every single day new opportunities to develop professionally arise, some experiential and others more passive.  The experiential ones have been my favorite - I enjoy presenting, advising, teaching, and creating and have capitalized on every such opportunity that has come along.  They offer me to hone these skills and put what I learn and read about into practice.  The more passive opportunities, such as attending presentations and conferences, are exciting as well, because I not only learn from my colleagues but also have the chance to take what I learn back to my practice and experiences, employing that newfound knowledge.

     As great as these opportunities are, I have also started to be very conscious of the time commitment they require.  I am still a graduate student and hall director, which amount to a full-time job alone, and it is not as though professional development activities are an excuse for not completing duties for those commitments - those opportunities are extracurricular.  So now I am very careful to consider three questions: (1) How much time will this take?, (2) When will this occur?, and (3) Will I develop professionally in a way I am not already?  If the time is not taking me away for too long or during an important time of the year (i.e., Closing), and it will assist my development along a competency in which I do not have much experience, I consider taking it on.  The way I see it, I might as well make the most of what is available to me, because professional development will only help me in the end! 

Quote Citation: Edison, T. A. (n.d.). The Quotations Page. Retrieved from: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/793.html 

Some Thoughts on Advising

"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

     Well, a lot has happened since I last posted.  There was conflict, there were - and still are - readings, and there was a ton of fun (what?! =)).  But there was also group advising.  In my position I have the responsibility of advising a hall council - a group of students who advocate for the residents of the hall and put on programs using a portion of the student fees.  It is essentially a full student organization with a full executive board and everyone contributing.  More importantly, they answer to only themselves, as I can only require actions of them when policy (or the law) forces me to.  Other than that, I am simply a voice on the sidelines that they can choose to listen to when they want.

     I have been developing a lot in what I say with that voice.  Last year I advised an excellent Hall Council as a Head Resident Assistant, but it was a very different experience, because they were all upperclassmen, programmed for an Apartment Complex, and were fairly self-sufficient in generating ideas.  This year's Council consists of mostly freshmen living in a more traditional residence hall, and, even though the ideas are always flowing, the follow-through and communication skills are not always.  This has forced me to step-in and guide conversation much more than ever, but the need to do this conflicts with my own views of what an advisor should or should not do.

     An important aspect I see in advising is allowing mistakes to occur.  Plenty of times last year and already a few times this year, I have seen parts of programs and initiatives that I could and wanted to change, but I had to leave them be.  They were simply not mine to modify.  Instead, they were the residents' programs.  Because I have let them be, they have been able to see the mistakes occur themselves, then reflect upon those mistakes and (ideally) learn from them.  This is part of the leadership development that we facilitate in student affairs - growth through mistakes and seeing what does not work when leading an organization.

     This is not to to say that I am perfect, at all.  I have made, and continue to make, plenty of mistakes when planning and executing programs.  I have advised groups and been surprised when their programs do not go well.  The aforementioned growth occurs at every level - I just have the privilege to advise groups because I have experienced more - this does not necessarily make me better.  It makes my voice louder in the room, which is why I have to restrain it at many point.  Because as much as I have steered students away from mistakes in the past, they have also proven me wrong and experienced great success when I saw flaws.  Their potential to create wonderful programs is so vast that my voice on the sidelines could just get in the way.  And so I will continue to only steer when asked.

Quote Citation: Churchill, W. (n.d.). Goodreads. Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2834066.Winston_Churchill 

Current Issues - Program Rankings by Public News Mentions

"To devise the rankings, researchers ran searches of the Google News archive to find out how often more than 12,700 faculty members had appeared in 6,000 news sources from 2006 to 2011. The citations for the professors in each department were tallied, averaged on a per-faculty member basis, and then ranked relative to the federal funds their programs had received." - Dan Berrett

Article Link: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Rankings-Frontier-/142197/ 

     It is no secret that the issue of how to rank colleges, universities, departments, and programs is currently at the forefront of news on Higher Education.  President Obama's new plan for higher education ranking and funding, which I commented on recently, re-sparked the debate on what constitutes quality and where does one find the value of a college degree.  It is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer.  Being very new to the field, I am still among those who say it is a too subjective question to answer - quality and value of education depend on the student in my opinion.  If you want to view this issue in academic capitalist terms, the consumer drives the value, not the researcher or anyone else.

     Unless you rank programs using the system devised by the Faculty Media Impact Project, described by Berrett in the article hyperlinked above.  The Project ranks institutions based on the number of citations in the news per faculty member in departments of Anthropology, Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Political Science/Government. Federal funding was also considered in the rankings.  The lead on the project, Dr. Rob Borofsky, recognizes that this approach has its flaws but simultaneously feels that its merits lie in the measurement of public service.  However, Borofsky also notes that "Much research is valuable and of high quality...while not being of interest to the public" (par. 15). 

     This was the exact sentiment I shared when reading Berrett's article.  For the sake of academic freedom, scholars should be able to research where they feel holes exist in the literature.  If a scholar has left a door open for you, and you want to walk through that door and have the ability to, then no one should be able to tell you "No" - besides your tenure board, federal funding agencies, the mass media, and others.  Cynicism aside, there are multitudes of research out there that no one outside of the scholars in a specific field have read, and yet those studies were incredible discoveries in their own right and led to even more such discoveries.  Furthermore, the frameworks and theories employed by authors of studies that grasp public interest were discovered or invented by previous scholars, and I am sure that most of those scholars were not cited in the news for those articles.  

     This is not to say that Borofsky's project has no merit.  Publicly funded institutions do have some implicit responsibility to their investors. "'People dealing with social sciences should be dealing with social concerns'" (par. 8) is not an unwarranted statement.  It all depends on what you see as the purpose of higher education.  Bowen (1977) separates the goals into those for individual students and those for society, noting some academic freedom in pursuing the direct enjoyments of learning for the individual student, while noting that promotion of social welfare was important in the goals for society.  Guttman (1987) more closely approaches the issue at hand by separating the purposes into academic and societal purposes while nesting both under democratic purposes. I believe that how well an institution meets a healthy balance of these varying goals should contribute to a metric of its quality - operationalizing that metric will be the next challenge.

Citations:

Berrett, D. (2013). The new rankings frontier: Mentions in the media. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Rankings-Frontier-/142197/ 

Bowen, H. R. (1977). Investing in learning: The individual and social value of American higher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gutmann, A. (1987). Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Picture source: http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2009679209_guest18kim.html 

Being On Call

"Nothing is so aggravating than calmness." - Oscar Wilde 

     Apologies for the pause in posts last week, but I had two important and time-intensive items on my plate - a leadership retreat for Hall Council two weekends ago and being the Hall Director On-Call from Tuesday to Saturday. Both were amazing experiences that I would do again in a heartbeat (well, I could use a short break from being on call), but the time they took away from work and sleep meant that I needed to read for class in the time I would have taken to write here. But no worries, I'm back!!

     I will eventually write more about helping with the Leadership Camp, but today I wanted to reflect a little on my first experience of being on call. The way our system is set-up here, there is one Hall Director on call for all of the residence halls at all times. We exchange the phone on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and each person does this duty once or twice per semester. The main purpose for having a Hall Director on call is to maintain protocol and procedure - this person enacts certain reporting chains, grants permission to call for emergency maintenance and custodial services, and acts as a consult when Resident and Desk Assistants are unsure of what actions to take. They also respond in person for more serious incidents to take control of these situations, making sure to obtain as much information as possible firsthand and ensure that the well-being of the community is kept in mind.

     All of the above became so much clearer to me after my first time being on call. Before that, I was not only terrified of not knowing what to do, making the wrong decision, etc., but also slightly uncertain of my purpose in everything. There are plenty of people above me in these reporting chains, and the protocols are rather comprehensive and clear. So why was I important, and why do those RAs and DAs need me?

     What I realized rather quickly was that a lot happens on a large campus that requires consultation. This is not to say that protocols and procedures are not clear enough - rather, students tend to find a way to sit in the few gray areas and make decisions difficult for RAs. This is where I come in. Not to save the day or be heroic, just to make the decisions and the calls that the RAs and DAs are unsure of. I get to be that reassuring voice saying, "Good job, you're making the right call" or joke with them about just how far out there an incident is. I hope they appreciate my sarcasm, because that's what I have to go on at 2 in the morning when something outright awkward is occurring. More importantly, though, is the calming voice I have to use when things really do blow-up and the person calling me is truly stressed. I find it extra-important in those situations that I am on my game, because those people are relying on me to be the voice of calm and reason. It is a great experience to be able to do them that kindness.

Quote Citation: Wilde, Oscar. (n.d.). Thinkexist.com. Retrieved from: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/nothing_is_so_aggravating_than_calmness/217597.html

Photo By Me

Current Issue: Social Media

"University-affiliated accounts—for instance, a department's Web site or library's Facebook page­­—are a different animal. They can broadcast a university's strengths, be used in teaching and research, attract prospective students and faculty and staff members, and cultivate relationships with alumni. But encountering a negative comment thread, or getting no response at all to questions or input, could turn off a student or donor. In the most dismal scenarios, online harassment or unreported threats could lead to legal complaints or campus violence." - Jennifer Howard

Article: http://chronicle.com/article/Worried-About-Message/141773/

     While this article does not provide much "new" or "exciting" information, the fact that it exists in the Chronicle should cause one to take pause and reflect on "What does my institution have out there?" and "How does my institution represent itself online?" As a student worker in my old institution's scholarship office, I was partially responsible for maintaining a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account. That was for one office. As a Hall Director, I have partial oversight over a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and an Instagram (I do not know how to use the latter). Again, that is only one out of over twenty residence halls. Knowing the amount of time and energy that should go into these initiatives versus the amount of time that I have put into each of them due to prioritization, I can relate to the desire for institutions to keep better tabs on their social media output.

     A big change that I have noticed at various institutions is one towards standardization and consistency. It simply makes sense. Inconsistency across social media accounts indicates a lack of cohesiveness at best and a breaking of ranks at worst. How many times have you clicked through a schools website and see myriad page backgrounds, fonts, colors, and even institutional names? If you are affiliated with that institution, it may not seem that large of an issue, but in that case you should consider the perspective of a prospective student. What does that inconsistency say to them?

     And then there comes the issue of student-run accounts. Not that students cannot run an account - as I have indicated, most students could run an Instagram account worlds better than I ever will. I am thinking of the administration's perspective on the exponential growth of social media accounts that occurs relative to the number of student groups there are, and the inability to control them. As Howard writes, institutions are moving away from the "We could never think to control this" perspective, and I am very interested to see what new policies and procedures come out of this movement.

Citation: Howard, J. (2013). Worried about message, colleges scrutinize social media. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://chronicle.com/article/Worried-About-Message/141773/

Picture by: Me :)