Special Edition Fall 2023: Reinventing Campus Life: A marriage story
By Mia Timlin
When students attend college, there are often several things they hope to get out of their experience. An education, of course, but also the opportunity to meet people, get a feel for what a campus has to offer and find the spaces where they belong. Up until the end of this past spring semester, there were two departments — the Department of Residence Life and the Student Center for Activities — that were largely responsible for the social aspects of students’ experiences on campus.
“I was the director of Residence Life,” said Amanda Perrin, now Director of Campus Life at St. Kate’s. “What we do at Residence Life is everything from the exciting, fun events and connecting students, and it’s also the parts that people don’t see behind the curtains. When folks are going through really tough times we hope to be there as part of a safety net.”
Perrin said that many of Res Life’s goals to support students, supply resources and “train and motivate and innovate” are now being done on a larger scale in collaboration with the SCA. This took place after former vice president of student affairs Matt Goodwin initiated, in Perrin’s words, “a marriage” of sorts between the two departments following the retirement of former SCA director Debra Miner.
“They added scope to my role,” Perrin said about her new position as the head of Campus Life, which encompasses both Res Life and the SCA. “One is not supposed to take over the other. … We’ve tried to very intentionally not utilize that language. You talk about reinventing the wheel — the cart is still moving, we can’t stop time and pause, so we’re trying to pause where we can while also knowing students still have needs.”
Like any major change, the crossover hasn’t been without its growing pains.
“There’s lots of thoughts and feelings and emotions around that and we want to respect that,” Perrin said. “While at the same time the hope was, my understanding from [Goodwin] was, that the SCA would benefit from the additional staff that Residence Life had.”
Perrin liked the analogy of the first pancake — that the first one on the griddle always comes off a bit burnt or funny-looking because things like temperature and timing are still being figured out. In many ways, this “marriage” of Res Life and the SCA is still very much on its first pancake.
Impact on Student Workers
Many of the people feeling these effects are the student workers employed by Res Life and the SCA.
“The merge meant we had our hours cut with no heads-up when we were doing our scheduling meeting,” said Erika Devore ‘23 (American Sign Language, Psychology/Graphic Design minors).
Devore has worked for the Information Center for three years and as Orientation coordinator for two. She is also currently an info desk lead — all positions that fall under the SCA umbrella. “We had all these different expectations from our new director,” she said. “And with that, we were given way more responsibilities with less workers working at a time.”
Devore said that in her specific position, one of the biggest changes was the number of students stationed behind the info desk on the second floor of the CdC at a time.
“When we first heard about our hours being cut a lot of our workers felt uncomfortable about that and unsafe working late nights by themselves,” Devore said. “But when we voiced our concerns, nothing changed.”
This shift wasn’t just in staffing and hours, but also in the amount of work that fell on students’ shoulders — which was enough to make one student worker quit.
“To all of us it feels like at best we’re just still in flux, and at worst it’s just sort of frustrating and we’re all, I don’t know, we joke a lot about quitting,” said Tara Harbo ‘25 (English/Studio Art, concentration in Graphic Design). “I was the first one to actually do it out of the pod of friends I still talk to.”
For Harbo, safety was a big concern.
“They were talking about all of these structural changes and stuff like that,” she said. “It really didn’t go over [well] with the staff, especially people working the night shift. It didn’t feel safe working alone, just ‘cause we’ve gotten some weird calls, had some strange people in the CdC who have refused to leave in the past, all of these different incidents.”
Harbo said that the existing protocol prior to the merge was centered around having two people at the desk, not just one. This change in policy was a concern for members of the staff.
“We ended up having a very, very long, sort of heated conversation about things that we could do to make us feel safe at the desk,” Harbo said. “And whenever we would ask or, like, propose ideas, they would be shot down.”
Devore said a lot of frustrations stem not just from the changes to the positions themselves, but from the way the changes have been executed and the communication surrounding them.
“I feel like hearing that Res Life and us were merging seemed like an ideal choice and it made sense to me when it was explained to me, but how it’s been implemented is not what I thought it was going to be,” Devore said. “Like I did not expect our hours to be cut, I did not expect to have a disconnect during Orientation, and no explanation to why these things were happening.”
The Orientation disconnect Devore mentioned was, according to her, a situation that lacked communication: Newly-merged members of Res Life planned events that would normally be handled by workers on the Orientation team. This instance demonstrates where Devore thought a lot of the trouble on the SCA student workers’ side is stemming from — an absence of clear communication.
“We appreciate transparency,” said Devore. “If we were told that our hours were being cut because of budgeting — which was the reason — we would have understood. But, from what we were told it was just like, ‘We just can’t.’”
‘Figuring it out as you go’
“I know the change has been hard,” Perrin said, when asked about how student concerns have been handled. “One thing I wish we could’ve done is slow down, but there are some things that we couldn’t. However, where folks have been generous enough to offer feedback, our hope has been to — while we need to keep going, look at how do we address this concern that has come in.”
While some student workers have felt a more negative impact from the changeover, others have had a different experience.
Kenzie Elsenpeter ‘24 (Respiratory Care) started working for Res Life last fall as a programming team assistant, and she has seen a shift in her work planning events in the residence halls to working with SEEK as a co-lead.
“Coming in as someone who hadn’t been on SEEK previously and then coming into a leadership role, I think there were definitely some people who were opposed to that, which is okay,” Elsenpeter said. “Change is hard for a lot of people. Change is hard for me.”
She said that she was challenged in the way she approaches leadership and learning how to go with a flow that already exists, while still being able to put her own twist on things.
“You’re figuring out as you go,” Elsenpeter said. “I’m coming into this place where I don’t know how everything functions and I’m supposed to help, like, lead this team, but I don’t think you always have to know the structure of something to be a leader within something else.”
A positive change she has noticed is an increase in the amount of students using the Student Org on a daily basis. This was something Perrin mentioned as one of her goals when it comes to the relationship between this merge, the engagement of students and the utilization of space on campus.
“[The CdC] is in her coming of age,” Perrin said. “Part of my hope in living into this space is to think about what is the legacy that was left and honoring the history of what was here and why, and what do our students need today. And not just the students who are here today, but the students who could also come in today. I think about, what things is our building learning and what things is our department learning that we can now kind of breathe into new life, or different life, to try and meet the needs of the three colleges we have.”
