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What makes Marquette RAs Exceptional

Discussing the training and development of Marquette’s residence life leaders

At Marquette, there is 1 resident assistant for every 35 students living in the residence halls.

At many other institutions, that ratio is 1 to 60.

Are you interested in becoming an RA? Attend the RA Information Session on Tuesday, November 27th at 8:30 pm in the AMU Ballrooms.

What are the specifics of your role at Marquette?

I worked at Marquette as a hall director, that was my first full-time job. I had a chance to work at a couple other institutions. It was the students at Marquette that I missed a lot. There really is no one like the students that we have here.

Even as I worked at some other great institutions, the students just didn’t compare. There was a great opportunity to return home, as I view Marquette, and so now I’m in my fifth year of this role. It’s been a really great joy to continue to serve Marquette.

Almost every school has a resident assistant or an RA position, but what makes the RAs that are here at Marquette University stand out?

One is our resident-to-RA ratio is about 1 to 35. Whereas some other institutions really it’s more at 1 to 60, and that makes it much more difficult to be able to have those types of one-on-one connections. For a place that really values caring for the whole person, how we can best equip student staff members to do that is to ensure that they have a manageable number of people who they are working with and who they are caring for.

So then you think about the stories of the things that we’ve encountered over the years of what really makes a Marquette RA great. I think about a story back to my hall director time where it was sort of a beautiful combination of the various services that we have in the halls.

We had a resident who — just before she was returning to college her sophomore year — her father passed away and his birthday was coming up. The RA had been very close to her and knew that this was coming up. So she had three other close friends on the floor and they decided they would all go out to dinner together to basically celebrate her dad’s birthday and try to help be there with her.

But then what took that to the next level is that that RA went to the hall minister for the building and said, “Hey, you know, do you think there’s anything that we could do to be able to help her?” Then the hall minister, after they got done with dinner, had baked a cake for them — a birthday cake, brought them all into the hall chapel in Straz where they each shared one of their favorite memories of their fathers and then had cake together.

It still makes me teary-eyed to think about that because to me, that is the difference, being able to go, “I’m not only going to care for you on this day that’s going to be really hard, but I’m going to take the additional steps to make sure that you’re surrounded by the resources that we have at the university to support you.”

Could you tell us a little bit more about your role as a hall director? What were the highs the lows and everything in between?

Absolutely. I was a hall director of Straz Tower, which I absolutely loved. What my supervisor Mary Janz will tell you is that when I initially came to Marquette, I didn’t think I was going to stay here long.

Oftentimes, I look at myself as a bit of a reluctant Residence Life professional because when I was an RA in undergrad, compared to the RAs I work with here, I would have described myself as mediocre at best. I remember kind of feeling like, “OK, I’m just gonna make my way through this and then move on to go do other things as an undergrad.”

Then in my graduate work, I was placed as a graduate hall director, which was not particularly what I wanted to do either and I thought, “Well I can do anything for two years. I could probably learn a lot in that.” As a grad hall director, I learned that I really loved working with student staff and finding those people who are like myself that I think initially had the sort of love or draw to help people, but sometimes it was the administrative elements, it was a structure of the job, it was for the bureaucracy so to speak, as much as you deal with that as an undergraduate student. My goal was to help to minimize that as best possible and give those student staff members as much space to do what they do best and have really meaningful jobs.

The cool part about Straz is that it’s a staff of 16 RAs and they were phenomenal. I’m still in touch with many of them today, and I’ve had the great joys to go to their weddings and be invited to baby showers and all these amazing things that happen that were built out of this community that came from employment. That was really outstanding.

I remember things together such as for St. Nick, we used to send letters home to parents inviting them to send a really nominal amount of money back. We would do stockings for each of the residents for St. Nick coming, so we would be up at 3 in the morning delivering all the stockings to all the doors around Straz.

I remember having this moment as a hall director walking on campus and I thought often of the term of Magis, “for the more,” and what that meant. I think I’d wrestled for a couple of years about really understanding what that meant to me. Suddenly having this moment of going like, “Ahh wait, this is being better today than we were the day before.” That’s what our students help us do, that’s my student staff members help me to do, it was being able to explain the “why” behind things and making sure that I really understood that as well. That made me a better professional and made me really love and enjoy my job to an extent that I don’t know that I would’ve had that experience at a different institution.

What’s one thing that you think new RAs tend to struggle with? Do you think that any applicant should know ahead of time where it’s like, “hey, you’re going to encounter this, just so you have this awareness going before applying for the role,” so that then you can kind of ponder it a little bit more just so you have that heads up.

I think new RAs really struggle with the residents who don’t want to have contact with them. I think that they hope that okay, I’m going to put my best foot forward, I’m putting my heart into this and everyone’s going to be as reciprocal to my sort of good effort, and sometimes that’s not the case. There’s always going to be some residents who whether it’s they want to have an arm’s length relationship with the RA, because they have a misperception of the RAs role as simply to write people up or whatever that misperception may be.

Something that I tell the RAs who I teach in RN class, so we offer a 1 credit class that’s for newly hired RAs that they take, is that they need to be focused on those who bought the ticket to the show.

Recently Justin Timberlake came to Milwaukee. He’s playing at the new Fiserv Forum. Do you think that Justin Timberlake for a moment was thinking about the people who didn’t buy a ticket to the show when he was performing? Absolutely not. He was focused on those who were there and his biggest fans and those who were excited to be there.

I think oftentimes RA will get so fixated on the people who didn’t buy a ticket, that they’re not serving the people who are there, who did buy the ticket, who are excited, and who are pumped about what they’re going to do. What I’ve watched happen in communities is that if you invest in those who want to be a part of that, others will begin to come along with that to. They’ll see that there’s something happening there that they want to be a part of and some maybe never will, but that’s okay.

We’ll continue to reach out to them as individuals and we’ll continue to offer them the opportunity to connect as a group, but don’t waste critical space in your mind on the folks who didn’t buy the ticket. That I think is one of the biggest challenges for RAs, is really feeling like that effort isn’t reciprocated.

Who should apply to be a resident assistant?

We are really open and welcome anyone who would consider themselves to be someone who cares for other people and want to contribute to enhancing the community at Marquette. I think that’s probably the most important qualification of considering oneself to to be an RA.

We see that primarily our applicants tend to be mainly sophomores which is interesting. A lot of people assume it’s primarily first year students who apply but I think a number of individuals give themselves a year to get to know the university, get to know different elements of their own experience and then apply to become an RA. We do have some juniors as well who apply. We would discourage a current senior from applying, so we really hope you’re moving on to graduate and go off and accomplish great things.

Who we’re looking for is any current first year, sophomore or junior student who wants to be able to contribute to enhancing the communities here at Marquette.

With all the RAs that will be applying, what are some common characteristics or qualities that you think all RAs or applicants who are interested in the position should have?

That’s a great question and a really common one I get and probably a difficult one to answer because I think that what is most important in a great RA is someone who is confident in who they are.

There really is no cookie cutter of what makes a great RA. Some have a viewpoint of the RA as being sort of the ultimate cheerleader, where they are someone who has a lot of extroversion, is out there knocking on doors and that can be a really great quality, but we also need RAs who are a bit more intuitive, who may be willing to step back and observe things first before reacting or acting.

That all helps to enhance the staff teams that we have as a whole, so that way there really is within our building, an RA who helps to meet and match the needs of every type of resident that we have. It’s really critical that a person is feeling solid in who they are and confident in what that looks like.

Something that I share with our applicants over the years is that if you begin the RA hiring process pretending to be someone who you’re not, that’s going to be really exhausting to be hired to be someone that isn’t authentic to who you are and trying to keep up with that facade in a job where you also live where you work, that’s really challenging.

I think beyond that, individuals who’ve been able to make meaning of their RA experiences.

We really look for people who have been able to put themselves outside of their comfort zones. When have you gone to learn about someone who’s different than yourself as part of your experience here? When have you gone to something that you went, “I don’t think I would have ever gone to a play like this before or ever just walked into the Haegerty Art Museum, but I did that because I wanted to explore,” that’s what we really want, are people who are curious and are curious about the other people who are around them. That’s what makes a really outstanding RA.

As we are kind of getting more into the holiday season, it gets a little bit more stressful with finals. Now we’re adding in applying to jobs, what advice do you have for people with helping them distress and keeping a clear head so that they can still present themselves the way that they want to present themselves, but still be themselves?

Exercise is a key way that I like to be able to de-stress and unwind and get out everything that I might be stressed out about.

I recently discovered Shred 415, they have one on the east side and one in Elm Grove. Basically this is a high intensity workout where you do 15 minutes of running sprinting intervals, and then you do weightlifting, then go back to the treadmill, and then you’re back to running sprinting intervals, and then back to weightlifting and you leave there with anything you feel stressed out about being left either on the treadmill or on the weights. I really enjoy that.

I think anything that you find that really helps you to be able to get some of that excess energy out is really useful. Maybe I think about that too because I have a toddler and all he does is run like crazy, all the time non-stop, like us he has a lot of excess energy to get out, we need to keep helping him do that.

I also am really a big fan of yoga and I know that Health Services offers some outstanding yoga programs in the 707 building. Everything from glowga, which bit more fun and social and/or regular yoga and being able to show up on your mat and reflect and set an intention for that time and just release and let go of the other things that are happening.

I think what’s most important is that you’re finding something that personally works for you and you’re committing to doing it regularly and being able to notice that.

I’m kind of snapping on my friends or on my family on the phone or I’m not taking care of myself in the best way possible. I’m seeing that in different ways. How am I listening to that and then responding because that ends up being critical not only while you’re applying to be an RA, but certainly as an RA as well.

Remember that you’re taking on a 20 hour a week job in addition to your academic work and you have to be able to have some methods in place to care for yourself and to recognize when alright, I need to get out of the building for a bit and just enjoy taking a walk in Milwaukee or taking advantage of going for a swim in the Rack or whatever that is, of being able to find ways to connect back with yourself of what’s really important and meaningful to you and really listening and responding to that.

My big piece of advice would be to pour into your community early on. Put in the additional time and effort and energy during the first 6 to 8 weeks.

I think something that we all observe that happens on the campus is that late August everyone gets back and everyone is smiling and cheerful and waving to each other and saying hello.

Then we hit mid to late September and that window begins to close and sure enough, we’re getting really close to midterms, suddenly everyone’s in the zone and they’re on their phones as they’re walking around campus and people are kind of finding their way.

The beauty of that first 6 to 8 weeks is that people are really open to new opportunities, being able to connect with other people and if an RA is able to really maximize that, that is going to make their job easier the rest of the year.

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