New Campus, New Connections

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." (Covey, 2004)

Hi. My name is Mike. I am a graduate student pursuing an MA in Higher Education and a graduate assistant in my campus’s housing office. I have a wonderful and supportive wife who lives in the residence hall with me. I enjoy reading, listening to music, sudoku, and watching TV online. And if you catch me with a camera in my hand, I am attempting a photography hobby that may one day start another blog. For now, though, let me tell you about Campus Connections.

When I first came to this new campus, I had told myself I would start a blog, without much direction in mind. I just knew that I wanted to share my experiences in a new place with people back home and from my undergraduate institution - people who would read this just to keep up with my life. Then it evolved in my head into something more “professional" - a way to share my experiences in the field of higher education and muse about ways to advance the field and better my own practice.

When I sat down to write this first post, though, it became a sort of compromise between the two. I want these posts to act on both a personal and a professional level. This blog will be a venue for my experiences to interact with each other, be they in the classroom, office, residence hall, athletic stadium, or the spaces outside of the campus cornerstones. More importantly, though, it will be a venue for my holistic experience to interact with the outside world, and I invite you to participate in that.

Basically, it is here that I will seek to understand what I am learning on campus, from all of these wonderful and new connections I am already making.

P.S. Oh, and I also will probably include a quote each time I post. The one above was in my supervisor’s expectations of our staff, and it was probably the most important lesson that I could be given about empathic listening and teamwork.

Quote Citation:
Cover, Steven R. (2004). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. New York: Free Press.