TiShawn Polk: Housing and Residence Life - Week 1

Activities:

-Learning the general schedule for housing accommodations in the fall

-Attending weekly resident director trainer meetings

- Understanding the offices connected to housing

-Speak with site supervisor regularly to know what opportunities are open

Experience:

My first week during my practicum experience was all about me getting a strong base knowledge of what goes into conducting housing affairs. Meeting with my site supervisor helped me to see just how busy housing professionals are. I wanted to do my practicum with housing for several reasons. The first is knowing how well organized the residence life staff must be in order to accommodate over 4,000 students and train RAs, RDs, etc. The second reason is knowing that housing and residence life plays a major part on every college campus in the United States. Their relevance to the student population will always be a factor. My last reason, is knowing how exciting my fellow classmates who are RDs can be. My brief time being staying on campus really made me want to be back on campus after moving away. Everyday, I get to take classes with these awesome individuals and now I will be working with them. My hopes is that after a very positive experience during this practicum is that I could possibly see myself working in this division of student affairs one day.

My supervisor informed me of the 4 areas connected with or within housing and residence life. These areas are Administration Operations, Facilities Management, Budget and Finance, and of course Residence Life. At first, it seemed as if there should be more connected to housing but after thinking about it, these are the only things that are needed to keep this machine running. He explained to me that throughout the month of June I can experience each of these different areas when I see fit to see what they were all about. I am most interested in the budget and finance division to see how housing and residence life is funded and then how the money is allocated.

Lastly, since most of the experience that I will be receiving will not start till July, I will be working closely with Kelsey who is head over the resident director training for the summer. I look forward to working learning what happens in these meetings. I admire everyone in my cohort but my housing classmates are extremely energetic, very bright, and talented in class. My hopes in being around them during the summer is learning what it takes to get the job done as they do.