RA: Counselor, adviser, friend

Providing a role model

The Resident Assistant (RA) on Scott Gray’s freshman hall did his job so well that by that first November, Gray ’06 began training to be an RA himself.

"He had an open-door policy," Gray remembers. "He was there to talk about relationships, roommates, politics, whatever. He was our RA, but he was also our friend, and he was a great role model in how he balanced having fun with getting work done."

Now a junior psychology major with minors in religion and math ("I’m your classic liberal arts student"), Gray hopes that he has set the same tone with his hallway of first-year young men in Douglass.

"They started clicking right off the bat, which makes my job a lot easier. The guys all seem to be hanging out late at night and going to meals together."

Gray balances his academic work with a jam-packed extracurricular schedule of intramural sports – he plays them all – and leadership roles with EMPOWER, a peer education program, and Meet-N-Eat, a program that matches students who don’t know each other for lunch in the dining hall. So why take on the job of RA?

"I had a very difficult hall last year, so I almost wasn’t going to do this again," Gray admits. "But by the end of the year, I had helped the guys through so much that I couldn’t imagine not coming back to this job."

Respect is lesson one

As RA for thirty first-year students, male and female, in Westminster House, Denise Mosley’s job is equal parts camp counselor, adviser, big sister, mediator, and wellness advocate.

Her residents also are classmates in two sections of First-Year Seminar, forming Westminster’s First-Year Living and Learning Program. In her first meeting with the students, Mosley announced that her top priority is that the students establish respect – for each other, for her, and for themselves. Respect covers all the bases, she says, from keeping dirty dishes out of the sink to not putting yourself or others at risk by abusing alcohol or drugs.

"I’m not here to police or control their lives," Mosley ’06 notes, "but I told them that my main concern is their health."

Mosley is a psychology major with a communication minor. She also serves on Campus Council, sings in the Gospel Choir, and works at the library. But her RA position feels like a twenty-four-hour responsibility. "Especially because the students are first-years, they’re constantly looking to me with questions. It seems more intimate in a house than in a dorm, like relationships develop more quickly." – L. W.