Sunday, July 20, 2014

TiShawn Polk: Housing and Residence Life – Week 5

Activities:
-Attend new Residence Directors trainings
-Attend Weekly RLT committee meetings
-Interact with BCDs
-Meet with supervisor

Experience:

This past week was jam packed with trainings. I feel as though I am an RD at this point, and that is not meant in a bad way. I feel I am learning a lot about the inner workings of the university as a whole. Monday we went on a tour of the housing facilities and learned the procedures involved with key inventory and the alarm system panels. The latter half of the day was focused on the very serious aspects of housing including referring students to the counseling center, emergency procedures, and veteran affairs. A common theme that I keep repeating about students in Housing is how friendly and family oriented they seem to be. The lesson I have taken from this week is the sense of responsibility they have on their shoulders. For instance, this past spring and fall are great examples of seasons of unpredictable weather. Being in the South, one believes the only thing you have to worry about is extreme heat and possibly flooding. However, we had everything from tornadoes to temperatures so low that residence halls were damaged from the cold. The cold temperatures were not necessarily life threatening, but the nearby passing tornadoes are always a constant threat to life. The stakes go up when the safety of other students is in your hands. Seeing the format and procedures RDs take once these emergency procedures arise really assured me that these people are at the least knowledgeable of what to do in these situations. I would like to commend all the 2nd year RDs for taking the proper precautions and keeping a level head during these events, and I know some have never experienced weather like that before. So kudos to you all! I ended the week by going on the RD retreat with housing. This experience was surreal and brought me closer to a family in which I hope our paths cross again in the future. In the upcoming week, I will be working with housing facilities and maintenance thanks to my best buddy Hannah. She has really gone out of her way to make sure I get the full housing experience. This shall be interesting.


At this point, I’m really not sure what chapter reading goes with this weeks blog posting, but I will refer to chapter 3’s lesson on ethics. One thing I really appreciate about our major is the counseling background. So often in student affairs we are confronted with very confidential information. Throughout training I have seen this come up especially this week once we began doing Behind Closed Doors or BCDs. BCDs are staged instances that an RD may encounter while on duty. One example I will use is in the case of sexual assault RDs must report directly to Dr. Bailey in order that someone’s information is handled by as few hands as possible in order to keep their identity hidden. I am learning personal ethics over and over again through this training process.

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