Bryan Kelley Week 6: Mississippi State University Welcome Center

Activities:
-Research for new information to include in the Maroon VIP Handbook
-Revise Maroon VIP Hand Book
-Complete editing of Maroon VIP Handbook

Experience:

This past week was certainly a hectic but fulfilling one. Over the course of the week, my Resident Advisers moved into my building in preparation for the upcoming year in addition to beginning of Residence Life Leadership Training. Throughout this process I have been in the process of the final editing process of the Maroon VIP Handbook. All of this was occurring while Residence Director Training was coming to an end at the beginning of the week as well. Needless to say I was managing my time to the best of my ability in order to manage all of these different tasks.

Despite the amount of work and other tasks requiring my attention, I had a rather productive week with my practicum experience. My efforts this week were largely focused upon the completion of the editing process for the Maroon VIP Handbook. This process entailed me combing through the text and fixing any grammatical errors that might have occurred in addition to stylistic changes throughout that increased readability. That process alone took several hours to complete. After that completing that part of the revision process, I began to flesh out and condense information for the different tours offered by the Maroon VIP organization. Again, this took quite a bit of time to complete. The final part of the process was tackling the comprehensive building list in the book. After the different textual changes, I began to insert the different pictures of buildings on campus. As one might recall, these pictures were collected from University Relations in the previous week. After inserting and formatting the pictures, the Maroon VIP Workbook was complete. This was an extremely gratifying experience to know that the largest part of the practicum was complete on my end for the most part.

The most gratifying part of the whole practicum experience is to know that I have not only contributed to the Welcome Center here at Mississippi State University, but also the the field of Student Affairs as a whole through the creation of a better educative experience for the Maroon VIPs. Taking this into consideration, it made me think about my contribution to the student affairs field at large. There is almost an expectation that student affairs professionals should seek out doctorate degrees in order to not only prove their commitment to learning to other professionals in the field, but also to demonstrate the commitment to personal growth and development. After some thought, I determined that I most likely will not be pursing a doctorate degree. This is due to the fact that I feel I can demonstrate my commitment to the field through a vast variety of different actions and through my work in general. With that being said, I do think the doctorate degree is a special award that signifies a true dedication to the field and is certainly something that many different professionals should seek out over their course of their career if they are entirely certainly that the student affairs field is the field they will ultimately spend the rest of their career in.