Jacob Haun- Week 4 The Holmes Cultural Diversity Center

Activities:

• Working on final details for PAWS orientation training
• Research for the men of excellence handbook resource
• Research for international weeks at other institutions
• Work with presentation creation

Experience:

This week was an excellent example of what balancing my life will have in store for me for my future student affairs career. We started our residence director training for my assistant-ship this week, and I also had to find time to work with my practicum. Scheduling I think will always be a challenge in student affairs because of the wide variety of meetings and things to do. However, it has been especially challenging this week. 

The readings from this week really spoke a lot to what I was doing in my practicum. Making contacts is very important for student affairs, and their has always been a struggle with making contact with faculty members on the academic side. The training that I am working with is PAWS training which aims at the retention of our minority students on campus. It has been really hard to make connections with faculty members about the importance of working with the Holmes cultural diversity center. In reading the text, I think that it has taught me how to better communicate the goals of what we are trying to. Professors are interested in the success of students, but helping them to understand the stakes that we all play in that are an important part in having that conversation.

Another piece of the reading that was relevant was the importance of making professional partnerships with other groups on campus. I think that this has become a really big part of my practicum in helping establish other guest speakers for training and for other organizations that are a part of the office within HCDC. Their is a mutual understanding about presentations and how they operate. If a group comes and presents to us, the office often agrees to help with presentations for their office when they come up. It helps to make these partnerships because it often means that you always know of someone to call when you need a specific service or presentation. Mentorship is also a big factor in working with other organizations. The book mentions the proven importance of having a mentor in college. Several of the students that work in our office would greatly benefit from a mentor that is a working professional at the university. I think that it is important to have professional contacts from within the university to help link different students to. I think speaking as a student affairs quasi-professional, I would also greatly benefit from a mentor. Also, the PAWS program is a program that is all about mentorship with students. Pairing an older student with a younger student has had proven success in our office, and it has been important to find the funding to help this program thrive.

Another experience I had this week was working with different ideas for presenations. HCDC does a lot of diversity presentations to a wide variety of different groups. The office works to tailor each presenation to individual groups so that the group they are presenting to gets the best out of it. It has been interesting to see the types of activities that the group can provide to make sure that each group has the most opportunity for feedback and conversation. I found this work very interesting an important for the office to consider.