This is too long for a Twitter post, and I’m not using that stupid Twitlonger thing…so here we go.
I don’t think the reason we interview the way we do is that complicated. Here’s the guesses I got from folks yesterday.
hmm…maybe. I have referred to some of our processes as “sanctioned hazing”. I’m not sure exactly what she’s referring to with HR issues.
Also, TJ went the “sanctioned hazing” route as well.
Fascinating.
Here’s my guess:
In student affairs, we regularly do national job searches. When we bring in candidates, usually a final three, then folks often have to fly in, often including an overnight stay or at the least, difficulty in doing an interview and flying out on the same day (though business travelers do this sort of thing).
So, that leaves many schools with a lot of hours to kill with a candidate.
I think, quite literally, the repetitive interviews with assorted groups of students and staff is more about filling the time than anything. We’ve got candidates on campus for a whole day and we feel like they should have something to do the whole day.
Let’s be honest, there are often a limited number of deciders in a job interview. Usually these people get the alone time that they need to evaluate.
I’ve mentioned before that often these presentations that candidates give do nothing but reinforce what we see from candidates in singular interviews.
I just have a hard time believing that “because we have the time!” is really a good reason for having a process that either wastes ours or the candidate’s time and may not even be that efficient.
One of my colleagues said the other day that “we are silly for how we interview in student affairs”. I agree. The process of having one hour interviews where different constituent groups ask the same questions is hilarious and repetitive, and could even be called time wasted.
And if the only reason we do it that way is because we literally have to kill the time, that’s even worse.
I was reviewing my transcripts this weekend and I noticed how poorly I had done during the year I was most involved in college. My GPA up until that year sat at a solid 3.615. Given that I was taking an intensive pre-pharmacy curriculum, and had 2 president’s list and 1 dean’s list semester, I feel pretty good about this number.
During the year I did student activities, I had 30 credit hours and pulled 2.57 GPA.
The following year, as student body president, a less demanding role on my campus, I was back to a 3.66.
So, what happened? I was super involved. I always tell people that my job during that year became student activities. I was Mr. Involved Student. Hell, I apparently liked it so much that I decided not to be good at my grades.
Of course, there could be 75 other factors in there, like the ending of a long term relationship, and a lot of other personal change. But I do believe the numbers are startling. A full point down in GPA and a return to that previous position the next year.
One last option, if you’re really feeling ambitious and like me (or just like helping people), Anyone who gives a gift of at least $5 to Charity Water using my birthday page will not only make MY day, but also make someone else’s. And just for the hell of it, I’ll throw in everything I mentioned above…for free.
You’re not obsessed with student led, staff supported programming. I think there’s a place for staff led programs. If programs are educational, they can be led by staff, but I do think that even this might be better as peer mentoring. If students lead initiatives with staff providing support and advising, students get engaged in a whole different level of programming
You don’t see yourself as an educator first. I know it doesn’t feel like it sometimes since we do so much crap to cover the university’s butt (and our own), but seriously, I wonder if you’ve lost all perspective when you say that you are anything other than an educator first and you work in student affairs.
You give up on assessment, or don’t try at all. I’m not talking about surveys. I’m talking about asking questions of the proper party to improve your practice. Are students learning anything? And if these aren’t “learning centric” (ie fun), then are we serving the population we should be. It makes me think you don’t see yourself as point 2.
You don’t know any faculty or try to connect with any. It makes me think you don’t have any idea what learning reconsidered is. Listen, I get that this is tough, but I read learning reconsidered not as a validation of student affairs, but instead as a redefining of learning as a whole. If you’re not educating the whole person, as a university, you’re not turning out the product that betters societies. Faculty and student affairs (should there even be the division?) should be engaged with learning collaboratively. To claim to be educators that don’t work with faculty is highly confusing.
You’re not advancing your education. I’m not talking “professional development” or Twitter chats. I’m talking about real substantive education. You work at a university for God’s sake. Classes are free. What the hell?
You forget that this is a job. Passion is great, fun is great, excitement is wonderful, but the truth is that you do this to earn an income and hopefully, possibly, occasionally enjoy it. You’re getting paid to educate students and keep them in school, not to have fun or get your giggles. Don’t forget about that job part.
You create policies and fees that are hostile to the goals of other staff. If you’re not allowing students to program or charging them unnecessary fees to program, I don’t know what you’re thinking. There are folks who are your colleagues that are charged with getting more programs to happen. I’m so confused.
You baby students or treat them like your friends. They’re not your friends and you’re not getting a medal for cutting them slack. Try and teach them something when they screw up. Don’t encourage bad behavior.
You think student fees don’t matter. Look, if you don’t realize that the fee gravy train can run out at any minute, I wonder if you’re high. Treat fees with disrespect at your own peril, my friends.
You haven’t read the foundational documents of our field. I get that graduate school reading wasn’t for everybody. But you should at least read “learning reconsidered” and chickering. Think about it. Critique it. Do some research. Be awesome
With an inherently serious app already available, I wanted to make something available that was a little less serious. I think everyone who works in student affairs has been frustrated with student development or students in general or maybe just working in student affairs, and you’ve wondered to yourself, what’s the big deal with this Chickering dude anyway?
Maybe it would make you feel better to Draw on Chickering.
Introducing the Draw on Chickering app! Draw on Chickering in 3 colors as well as big and large dots. Perfect for getting through those frustrating days in grad school and work! Stop posting passive aggressive posts on Twitter and start drawing on Chickering’s face (not endorsed by Chickering himself, even though that would be awesome).
Click the Buy Now button, credit cards as well as PayPal accepted and I’ll send you the APK file and installation instructions. Android only.
I posted on Twitter recently that I wanted to learn how to program phone apps. Here’s my first foray into doing so. This is an Android app specifically for student affairs professionals.
Are you a seasoned student affairs professional who needs a little theory refresher? Or maybe a grad student that’s trying to test yourself on your theory knowledge? This app is simple enough for you to pop open once in awhile as a refresher, but substantive enough to make you think about what it is we do as a profession.
I’m offering this for now for $.99. Send in a Paypal payment using the link below and I’ll send you the APK file and installation instructions for Android so you can install the app yourself.
I started thinking about this idea, because there have at least been some rumblings about the student affairs program at UNCG being in danger; I don’t personally lend much credence to these rumors. Truth be told, with budget cuts as deep as the ones that we’re getting ready to feel the brunt of, we’re all in danger here. The second reason was some comments on this article about WWU getting rid of their student affairs program. One particular comment stung a bit.
The fact that a university could offer a Master’s degree in something called Student Affairs Administration demonstrates just how sad things are in academe.
The State of Washington and Western Washington University will be much better off without this academic tripe.
If this year’s loss of public money has provided this result, the state legislature should do more of the same budget cutting next session.
Interesting point, no?
My comment on Twitter was that he may have a point. In my opinion, the value of student affairs programs, like any other program, is all over the map. Some are a complete waste of time, some are very assistantship focused (mine was) and some are academically rigorous. So, if you want to come on here and argue about whether we need student affairs programs, I’m going to delete your comment.
My question is how we would acquire the skills that would make us good at our jobs without having a specific department dedicated to these degrees.
I’m going to go through my degree audit and see where things might land if they weren’t taught by student affairs folks.
Foundations of Student Affairs – this is a tough one. rough start! Basic idea was to learn about different functional areas in student affairs. My solution: “The American University” – a course that covers university structures and functions – it’s written for student affairs folks, professors, athletic admin, anyone who wants to work in the university system. I’d house it in the business school since it focuses on org theory and let a senior level (i’m thinking vice chancellor of something) teach it.
Research in Adult and Higher Ed – This could be taught by any professor, really. Just require a research methods course for behavioral sciences.
History of Higher Education – it’s important to note that these last two courses have not focused on student affairs. Suggestion: “History of Education in America” – house it in the history department. Surely someone could teach this that would be worthwhile from that department.
The Adult Learner – not really a student affairs class either. This was an elective for me…sooo….you could take pretty much anything here.
Law and Higher Education – another class that wasn’t student affairs. There are a plethora of places you could stick something like this and make it worthwhile. You’re telling me pre-law students as well as aspiring law breakers wouldn’t take something like this? C’mon now.
Statistics for Behavioral Sciences – I took this as an elective (yes, i’m insane). It was taught in the Stats Dept. Moving on.
Student Characteristics – to be honest, I could have done without this class completely. However, if we still need it, I think you stick it in the education department and call it “teaching the millenial (or fill in generation)” and offer it for higher ed folks as well as high school teachers.
Finance and Higher Ed – elective that I took from the doctoral progarm. You can debate the necessity of the doctoral programs, but that’s not really something I want to do here. I do think we need people studying higher education, professors, law, etc, but I’m not sure this couldn’t be accomplished elsewhere. That being said, it’s finance. We focused alot on state and national funding of education, so I think you call it something like “state/private funding of education” and stick it in the political science or business school.
Group Counseling – counseling class, offered through the school of counseling. Not much to see here.
Current Issues in Higher Education – I honestly can’t remember what we did. Much like the initial course, I think this could be of value as a seminar type class for anyone aspiring to be professors or admins or just work in or with higher education. If I had to put this somewhere, I’d probably put it in the government/poli sci area, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep if we replaced this with an elective.
Admin and Finance of Student Affairs – nice course, but I actually think we would have been better served by requiring two masters level business courses instead of this and the last one. I don’t see why we need to specialize this skill so much (remember, we want to learn competencies!).
Student Development Theory – I’d do the same thing here that I did with the Student Characteristics Class. Focus it on how students develop from high school through college (c’mon….you’re telling me it wouldn’t be better to get some more scope here? as well as having HS teachers better educated about development?)
So, that’s my plan on what I would do if we lost student affairs programs as currently constituted. I think you could offer degrees in higher education administration that pull from all sorts of departments, while making those departments better at the same time.
And that’s not to mention that there might be value in having an MBA or a Masters in counseling graduate (or even a masters in recreation) working in our student affairs departments. The important part is the core competencies that can be gained from these classes and degrees and not being tied to the programs themselves if that’s not what the university wants to continue to support.
My good friend Laura Pasquini shared this link on twitter a while back, a youtube video with people sharing their biggest regret (ok, it wasn’t this video, but I couldn’t find the original. this will do).
My initial response was that I try to not live with regrets, I just have things that I do using the information I have at the time. It’s foolish, I think, to look back and think about regrets because you’re viewing it through a lens that was different than the one you had that you used to decide to do whatever you did that you regret. It’s unfair.
So on the surface, I hate this question because it’s unfair and it’s filled with people being unfair to themselves. I’ve seen too many people in my life get so burdened down with regrets of things they did, things that they wish they did and things they shouldn’t have done. They stop functioning and stop living forward. To quote Don Draper, do what you have to do in life, move forward and you’ll be surprised by how much these things didn’t matter.
However, I was surprised to find myself at the orientation presentation I give for students, starting to realize something I regret. I was giving three presentations, off and on, during orientation sessions, one which focused on parents and rallied them to get their students involved with campus, one on campus events and our campus activities board, and one on the offices in student affairs and how we provide life-changing experiences and resources for students. Two of these sessions, the ones that weren’t about campus events, were presented with other offices, including the career center. The funny thing is that I found myself mentioning, quite specifically, the career center in the other session. But why? I wonder if I didn’t see myself quite a bit in their 18 year old faces, making me feel that I needed to tell 18 year old me a story.
Let’s backtrack.
I started off college as a business major. During the first week of school, I changed to pre-pharmacy, presumably because I wanted to make that bread (academic advisors will find that familiar). I did well in pre-pharm, and was admitted to pharmacy school after my sophomore year. While working in the pharmacy, I realized that I hated it, so I drove back down to my college the summer before pharmacy school, dropped out and re-enrolled in undergrad as a chemistry/biology major. After one semester, I dropped the bio major to a minor and would eventually graduate as a chemistry major. Somewhere in there I got wrapped up in student activities and we know how that ended (if you don’t, check my about page).
So, not knowing what to do with myself at this point, I left to live in California for the summer, while I waited to hear back from the bizarre collection of graduate school applications I’d submitted (phd in chemistry, mba, divinity school (yes, i said that)). I was admitted to all and decided that the phd in chem was the best financial path since I’d be making a whopping $24k per year and have my tuition covered. I would end up leaving the program after a semester with terrible grades, complete disinterest in my classes and the stink of failure. I would have left in September, truth be told, because I hated it, but I couldn’t give up on my teaching obligations.
Fueled by that experience, I somehow acquired a teaching position teaching 7th grade science that I would leave at the end of the school year. After that, I got a CNA certification and got a job at a small surgery center. During the course of that year, I decided I wanted to do student affairs, but couldn’t apply. So I left this job when my lease ran out and was able to acquire a job working in the mortgage industry with Wells Fargo. During my time there, I’d be admitted to grad school and the rest, as they say, is history.
So, why did I tell you all this? Other than self-mutilation?
The truth is, I was a complete idiot. I hope that the seasoned career folks and student affairs pros can see the foolishness in my path there. I entered college with no direction, left college with no direction and spent the next four years doing the career exploration that should have been done as a college student, if not as a high school student. In truth, I didn’t realize how lost I was. My parents weren’t able to help, even though I know they really wanted to, and I wasn’t wise enough to seek professional help at that age.
My biggest regret is that I didn’t know how lost I was. I wish that I’d had the intelligence and foresight to go ask a seasoned career pro to help me through how lost I was, maybe to give me a career inventory or something (oddly enough, one of these landed me in student affairs). I wish that I hadn’t spent three years wandering around lost. It cost me a relationship, friendships, three years of earning potential, a lot of emotional distress, and a lot of time doing something I love.
So, I think that’s why I felt compelled to reach out to these freshman. I don’t want them to end up like me, someone who just blindly stumbled into his vocation. All of the resources I used to get here are available to anyone on the internet or in a career services office. Don’t be a moron like me and not take advantage of it if you find yourself lost.
Truth be told, I’ve seen a career professional 4 times since I started my masters degree in 2007, and I plan on going back the next time I feel a little bit lost. They’re good at it, and I trust that they have my best interest at heart.
That’s the thing about regrets. As long as they inform your future, and move you on towards something positive, they’re worth your time. Just remember, as the avetts say, when you run make sure you run to something not away from. I think I’m running the right way….for now.
When we last left the tale, I had been given notice by our IT guy that not only were we capable of storing and saving the data that I wanted, we already had the software that we needed present on our computers and, not only that, we were already using it, just not correctly. I was more amused than anything, but not overly surprised. Given an environment of high turnover, a system that is fairly complex, and an overall student affairs fear of data, I found it not altogether shocking that this information would have disappeared somewhere along with the names of the guys who shot Tupac and Biggie and the Iraqi WMD’s.
So, Chapter 3 starts where the IT guy warns me that he was nearing the end of his effectiveness, as, most likely, we didn’t have access to the student database that we needed to cross reference the IDs that we swiped so that we could actually make something reasonable out of the data other than just a collection of scrabble like number combinations. Quite literally, the data we were collecting would be useless without access to this database.
Let’s pause here for a little personal interlude. After we’d figured out that we could in fact collect the IDs with our swipes and save the information, I was feeling particularly empowered. I went across the hall to @curtistmed’s office and immediately told him that, not only were we good to start collecting data, but that we would eventually be able to use it. Frankly, I had nothing to back this up at the time. However, we all know that the university is largely about politics. Going into an assistant vice president’s office and saying “we need to collect some data and use it” is a far different than “we’ve been collecting this data all semester but IT won’t let us use it”. Huge difference, in fact. Question 1 is complex and multi layered, Question 2 is not complex. My political clout, if you will, to get what I need, would ultimately be in the data that we were going to collect and I knew we would be able to collect it.
Personal interlude 2 – I’m relentless. Keep turning me down and I will keep knocking at your door. Acting like that is a stupid philosophy when you’re being selfish. Acting like that when you’re trying to do the best job possible at work, and the thing that you’re trying to get will make you better at your job is smart. Play your political cards correctly, push when pushing is wise, and step your game up when pushing isn’t wise. I should explain the step your game up piece – going and whining to your AVC when you haven’t done your research and due diligence is foolish. If you’re going to appeal to a higher power, then at least do your due diligence. I’m reminded of the story about the man drowning on the roof of the house and praying for God to save him and he sees a man with a raft, a man with a plane and a man with a hot air balloon (or was it a jet ski or something? I swear I’ve never seen a hot air balloon just randomly flying over a flood. Maybe it was a dinghy), but he turns down all three rides . When God comes back, the man says “you didn’t save me” and God says “who do you think sent the boat, the plane and the balloon?” Don’t be that dude. Regardless of your religious affiliation, I hope you understand that the idea is about using all the resources at your disposal before you start wasting your AVC’s time. The AVC is the nuclear option. If you play your cards right and utilize all your resources, you shouldn’t need to use them, unless you get to the point you really can’t do anything else. Then it’s time to push the red button.
Anyway, back to the story.
So, the IT guy sets up another appointment to come by and check out whether we had access to this student database on Banner. I’m going to spare the argument that I think could (and maybe should) be made about whether all of us should have access to these files. He was surprised to find that our office did, in fact, have access to all of the student records through Banner, and within about five minutes of clicking around in Microsoft Access, we had a query set up to pull student data like Year/Classification/Age/Housing Status/Meal Plan/Major from the student files. The one piece we don’t have access to was, this is slightly hilarious, the file that actually contains the data we’re collecting. In IT guy’s opinion, this was not especially secure information and he saw no reason that we shouldn’t be able to get access. I concur. It would be even more fun to go into our AVC’s office and say “i’ve been collecting data all semester, can i please access it?” The access has been requested, though, so we’ll see how it goes.
At this point, I felt comfortable to approach our interim director, the Assessment Director for our Student Affairs Department about the process I’d been going through and how far I’d made it, and I think it’s fair to call her reaction complete and total shock. I won’t go into the details of the conversation because that’s for her to share, but suffice it to say, she was shocked that I’d been able to get this access to data and the ability to swipe cards to tally who was attending events. My reaction “i really wish I could tell you this was complicated and I’d done something magical, but I genuinely think people had had difficulty getting access to the student data that they need, so they just started telling people they couldn’t event track attendees at all and shouldn’t waste their time”. Obviously, that statement was complete conjecture on my part, but it’s my best guess to why I got to where I did and others haven’t. I should add that the overwhelming assistance from the man in IT was a huge help. IT man, if you read this, I owe you a beer (or six).
Someone told me the other day that they thought we didn’t do anything during the summer in activities since we largely stopped doing programming. While we do for all intensive purposes stop doing programming, it’s a little shortsighted to say that we’re not working.
I say that May is vacation month in student activities, as well as much of the rest of the university. I call it May, sponsored by Yahoo games, because if there’s any time that office playtime hits then it’s May. I think everyone in our department took some time off and more than one of us took an entire week off. The yearly programming calendar that requires us to be on campus and in events during the school year completely grinds to a halt during May.
who doesn't love pop n drop?
However, May was project time for most of my fellow professionals. We wrote up a sponsorship packet, collaboratively with our program team, that I will share on this blog as soon as my colleagues feel okay with me doing that, and I already mentioned the assessment program that I started with a blog post, and updated recently (and it’s almost ready to be updated again). Those projects took up a good chunk of my May, as well as prepping for our orientation program that started in June.
The other thing that we’ve been taking a lot of May to do is to prepare for the fall. I was a new staff member in October, so I, quite literally, am not sure what some of our fall programs are supposed to look like. We obviously had welcome week and homecoming somewhere in there, but these are different at every campus, so it’s pretty hard to conceptualize the exact scope of traditional programs without having seen them.
So, has my May been different than my year? Hell yeah. Does that mean we’re not doing anything? Of course not. We’ve been doing lots of different and that includes me begrudgingly showing up at 9am every day. Is it August yet?
Strengthsquest doesn’t actual test strengths. It’s not the NFL combine.
It’s a self reported test of what students think their abilities are. I’d say it’s not necessarily searching for strengths, but more for what students aspire their strengths to be. It’s like a mirror into our desires, if you will.
More importantly, it’s an assessment of what we value in ourselves. Seeking out opportunities based on what we like to think we’re good at is wise, because in theory, we’ll find more value in the work (unless we suck at it…which this doesn’t test). Like being an individual? Seeking out environments where you can autonomously dominate are more ideal for you. Like being a cheerleader (any woo’s out there?), you might not want to be a lone wolf somewhere.
As an admitted specialist, I’m 100% on board with realizing that you can’t be good at everything, and honestly why would you want to be? We have a limited amount of time on this planet and wisdom is in not trying to be “everything to everyone” (clearly I was a child of the 90s). Some people are never going to like you, some things you’re always going to stink at, and some activities you’ll always enjoy more than you do other. I’m all for expanding horizons and not being a stick in the mud, but I’m with Parker Palmer, no matter what you try to do, you’ll always be you. Teachers will always try to be teachers.
As far as my own work, like Cindy, I often try to encourage my students to realize their own limitations, and instead of trying to make themselves into the uberman, I encourage them to surround themselves with people that compliment their own skill set and to defer to them as much as possible. A common statement is “being the chair (or manager) doesn’t mean you do everything, it means you make sure everything gets done and done well.”
So, is this counter intuitive to my student affairs practice? Not at all. I think it is common to the generalist perspective, where everyone assumes they can handle every task. I shudder at being that way personally, I have an aversion to screwing up. But maybe that’s just my individualization talking.
I’ve been talking for awhile with @ssandstr about the concept of professional boundaries (and having a highly amusing DM conversation about how Twitter reveals more than we think it does, especially with regard to this issue). We might be producing something epic if we can get up the nerve to actually share the hilarity that we’ve been compiling. So, stay tuned for that, or possibly be afraid. The losers will be taunted and booed till our throat is sore!
I wanted to talk about one issue in particular that’s been weighing on my mind, one particular issue of professional boundaries.
It’s my belief that as professionals (and dare I say, as people), we really screw up when we try to do things that we’re not trained to do. For instance, in my role, I’m fairly trained and competent at doing events and engaging students. I can help your student organization work it’s way through putting together events, can talk through safety issues and communications, and make your event kick enormous amounts of ass. I am not, however, licensed to counsel students on career, addictions or relationships. I’m not qualified to give academic advising advice or talk students through their financial aid. You get what I’m saying. I’m qualified to be the activities/student union guy; this is my work and my passion and I’m good at it. And I can probably help with some tech stuff. Just sayin.
I have made some mistakes in my career where I’ve put myself in the middle of these other processes and it’s been instructive for me. The difficult thing with student affairs is that our students seem like our friends; we can talk to them like adults, they are interesting and funny and often their questions remind us of what we were like in college. We want to help them. We’ve had life experiences so maybe we can share our experiences with them and it will guide them down the path to righteousness! Wrong.
While we’ve all had life experiences, professional skill comes from seeing situations on a daily basis. I’m continually amazed by the skill of my career counselor as she has helped me to think out my own life path. She wasn’t born this way, she’s honed her skill by working through this process with numerous individuals on a daily basis. Same with all of our functional area pros – they’re good at what they do because they’ve repeatedly done it. I think people are fools to put on events without talking to student activities!
I’m really interested to hear other’s takes here.
While we can certainly connect with our students and treat them as people, we’re not their friends. And more importantly, we do them a disservice by getting involved in their lives in ways that are outside our professional expertise. Since I doubt you are going to know what I mean when I say “getting involved”, I mean when you’re in a student’s business past the level of your professional relationship. If you’re counseling them on their relationships, talking to them on more than a basic level about their career choice (for example – i might try to connect a student’s experience on the programming board to their career goals), or doing anything, really, that might be better done by someone else on campus.
I know you want to help, student affairs. But sometimes helping is getting them to someone that can actually help. Don’t get yourself in a bad situation. And serving your customer, the student, is not about YOU, it’s about them. So let go and let the person who can actually help give them assistance.
Honest truth – ACUI is my professional association home. I’ve been to NACA, ACPA and ACUI – even though NACA holds it’s own place for me, ACUI is my conferencing home. #Acui11 was in Chicago, a city I’d never been to and was looking forward to exploring. I made special plans to stay an extra 3 nights in the city and flew my lady up to join in the experience.
The hotel was on the Magnificent Mile, which is sort of a love-hate thing for me. In my travel soul, I fancy myself more Anthony Bourdain than Samantha Brown. I love the grime, I love the guts of the city, I like to wander and try weird places I’ve never seen or heard of before. I hate places like the Magnificent Mile and (even though the first view is pretty damn stunning) Times Square. However, I do enjoy the lap of luxury and staying in a Marriott at ACUI certainly feels luxurious.
At #acui11, I presented 3 times: Two full length sessions, one on Late night dance parties and once on transitioning from grad school to professional work, and one technology flash session on podcasting with Jeff Jackson. If you’ve never presented at a conference, I highly recommend it. I wanted to get in on the other end of ACUI during this experience and being able to present helped me to feel like instead of just being a spectator, I was participating in the professional education of colleagues. At ACUI 10, one of the speakers stressed giving back for what the association gives you and for me, presenting was my first step in doing that at a national conference. I hope to present at ACUI in 2012 as well as NACA. All of my presentations were co-presentations and if you can do that, i’d highly recommend it, especially if you’re bringing in someone from another institution. Being able to combine experiences as well as bring two different presentation styles to the table only makes for better content and presentation. Deepti and Beth were both excellent counters to my haphazard and intuitive style.
The keynotes were very hit or miss. I thought James Fowler’s keynote on his research and his book “connected” (i’m reading it soon) was excellent, but a lot of people hated it. I thought the opening keynote was awful, full of platitudes and rah-rah leadership coaching, but many of my colleagues ate it up. The Lt Dan Choi keynote was unusual and I’m still not sure what I think of it; he’s clearly still riding the high of his political victories (and I don’t blame him), but something about the whole thing was unsettling and I’ve yet to put my finger on it. My guess is that he struck me as someone who’d found a higher calling and I’m still wondering if I’ve got one.
I thought the sessions were excellent, as usual. I make it a point to go to sessions that don’t necessarily apply to my day-to-day work but instead GROW my professional competencies. I was pretty successful at finding interesting content that was outside of my box and I felt stretched and challenged by sessions like the vision and branding of the Ohio Union and the session on being a 21st century union director.
The tweetup was fascinating; I think I realized how disconnected I’ve become from the larger sachat community. At acui 2010, I knew everyone at the tweetup and it was great to finally put faces to names. This year, I knew maybe 25% of the room and spent most of my time talking to Tom Krieglstein, Beth Goad, TJ Willis, Joel Pettigrew, Seth Hagler, Sam Brandenburg, Jeff Pelletier, and Jeff Jackson. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in other people, it’s just that I literally had no clue who they were. I don’t follow them on Twitter and I’ve never seen them anywhere; I’m glad they’re engaged and active in the community online and I hope they’re finding their place though. I guess it was the first moment where it really sunk in how much I’ve disconnected from the student affairs chat on twitter; part of the reason for this is functional due to the timing of my lunch on most days and part of it is that I’ve just stopped getting much out of it. I engage with the folks that really challenge me and I love having conversations with wise student affairs folks, but I don’t get much out of the student affairs chat community any longer. I took my content off of the sablog months ago (at least i thought i had…fixed that today) because I didn’t think it was something that I was contributing to with regard to the content that was submitted from other folks. Nothing against the rest of that content, but I don’t think that’s where I’m going in April 2011. Time marches on, things change.
Breakdrink did a podcast on site in Chicago that could have gone better. We typically podcast from several hundred miles apart, so literally standing beside Jeff Jackson, both with our sweet mics, and we encountered some issues with echo that we had not anticipated; we thought we had fixed this, but we hadn’t and thus the entire show had to be scrapped. It’s unfortunate, we had some great interviews with conference attendees as well as the first ever breakdrink podcast audience. Unfortunately, much like “Smile”, that podcast has disappeared to not be found, unlike “smile”, it won’t be released 25 years later as a shell of itself (or will it?)
All in all, I had a blast at #ACUI11. We had several off the record meetups about the future of all sorts of ideas and ventures that I’m literally chomping at the bit to bring into the public eye…but well…I just can’t yet. It’s great to be in one place, with so many like minded folks that are all about building community, having fun, being themselves and living life to the fullest.
Exciting side note: I’ve stepped up to lead ACUI’s Technology Community of Practice. I hope to discuss usage of technology in the student union and student activities world, provide simple accessible flash sessions on technology competencies (i’m trying to figure out if i can open source this on youtube), provide relevant professional education at the conferences and do our best to provide a community online to discuss topics. A big part of this will be the arrival of the twitter chat to discuss college union and activities topics that will debut this summer.
We need to track individual student’s attendance at events over the course of their time at the school. I’m not particularly interested in doing this for any purpose other than to see that student affairs programming is actually reaching all of the students. I suspect we’ll find that we’re hitting a small portion of the population. To my knowledge, the infrastructure does not exist to do this, but what I’m seeing in my head is an enormous spreadsheet with individual student ID #s and tracking of what events they attended. Frankly, this could be an entire student affairs (as well as athletics) effort to figure out what experiences our students are actually attending.
Learning outcomes listed and justified for EVERY event. I posted about the CAS standards here previously, and i’m thinking that you could list out individual learning outcomes for each event and then track these over the course of the year. In theory, each office (even better if this was a collaborative SA effort) should be hitting all of the learning outcomes repeatedly. Being able to cross reference these to determine what portion of our students are getting hit (not just shots in the dark, but actual individual students) by each learning outcome will give you some idea of what’s actually happening.
Cost per student for each event. If you’re tracking who attends, you should be able to get actual attendance numbers instead of estimates as well. Calculating cost per student will help to determine whether students are actually getting the value that they should be getting out of their student fees. A healthy look is to determine how much a similar experience might cost elsewhere; if cost per student is lower, you’ve done your job.
A few thoughts:
This plan places the responsibility on staff for accountability instead of surveying students to determine whether they’re engaged. We’re responsible for creating an environment for student learning and this plan tracks whether we’re actually creating that environment.
For the most part, student affairs learning/community building is tracked over a longer time frame than classroom learning. You can definitely learn chemical structures (okay…maybe you can’t…but i did) over the course of a day of studying. You can’t learn how to have meaningful relationships over the course of a day. Short time frame assessment, in light of this thought, is rather pointless and this system would provide the infrastructure to do a more meaningful long term study.
Self reported assessments of students are of marginal value anyway. Incentive exists for students to either not take these seriously, say what they think the surveyor wants them to say, or outright lie. In light of the incentives, the data received from these assessments (unless you’ve managed to limit these incentives somehow) is questionable.
Tracking financial expenditures with more accountability for said expenditures is imperative. I’ve heard SA folks refer to activities fees as “play money”. Please.
Tremendous research opportunities would be made available by tracking all of this data. I think we all know that’s needed.
I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the comments.
NACA 2011 in St. Louis was my first NACA (national association for campus activities) Convention; I’d never been to even a regional before and so this was a completely new experience. My previous experience with national association conferences in student affairs had been with ACUI and ACPA, both of which focus around professionals and professional development. Not so with NACA.
The focus of NACA is entertainment and entertainment showcases. Primarily, it seems that these conferences focus on activities boards themselves and their responsibility of bringing in campus entertainment. Groups pay for the opportunity to showcase their talents, products or services and attendees to the conference can converse with these vendors. “Celebrities” seem to be a big thing at NACA; I put this in quotations because some of these “celebrities” this year were Hanson, Ben Bailey from Cash Cab, and the ever-present Mr. Belding from Saved by the Bell. Check out the schedule if you’re interested in learning more.
There is an attempt at student and professional development at NACA. 6 blocks of educational sessions (largely focused on students but possibly applicable to all) and 4 blocks of professional education sessions pepper the schedule. I would say these sessions aren’t necessarily of the quality of the sessions I’ve seen at other conferences, but I have heard that they’re much better than they were in the past. On that, I say kudos to NACA. I know my students were excited about the educational sessions they attended at NACA, particularly @mikesevery and @oberbecca’s session on career searches and social media.
Also kudos to NACA on encouraging social media use and creating an app for conference users to keep up with sessions and showcase times. I think there’s room for it to grow, but I think it was a great start. The Conventionist (and hopefully the NACA folks) will be joining us on our BreakDrink podcast on April 4th. If you’d like to check out the app, you can download it here.
An interesting twitter conversation got started around the NACA hashtag about rudeness in sessions and there were a couple different topics that were created from this discussion. I’m gonna go around the topics thematically and then share my two cents on each.
Is it rude to leave showcases early? I think you have a functional problem here. Folks choose to leave early because these showcases are LONG (120 mins, usually) and with St. Louis being effectively the set of I Am Legend, dinner options were not as great as I would have hoped. Huge crowds of people were at this conference and I think folks just decided it was better to duck out than to sit and listen to an act that they weren’t interested in. Simple solution – if you think you might leave early, sit in the back. We sat in the back, could see well, and there were plenty of seats. I’m wondering, though, if shorter showcases might help with this problem. That and people not being so darn offended by EVERYTHING.
Is NACA educational or transactional? Tough one. In my perception, and I’m fine with being corrected here, the process is transactional. Folks go to NACA to block book or to learn about artists and vendors so the primary purpose is transactional. I think you can spin anything to be “educational”. The experience of being on a program board, given the mentoring opportunities and experiences (read this research article) should be educational. But I think if you’re spinning CAMP, Block booking and Showcases as educational, I think you’re living in Spin Alley and not in the real world. That being said, the purpose of the educational sessions is education and, as I said above, my students got a lot out of it.
So, that’s my two cents on NACA. I’m looking forward to 2011 in Charlotte. And I think I’ll go into it knowing more of what to expect and get more out of it!
I dropped the 150 rule into conversation at our last activities board meeting (aka Dunbar’s Rule), so I figured it might be worth fleshing out on my blog for the uninitiated (yeah, i know that’s a wikipedia link. Get off me.).
The general idea is that human beings are only capable of maintaining some sort of meaningful functional relationship with 150 people (the wiki article says between 100 and 230 but I’ve always heard 150.) Meaningful relationship is generally defined as the understanding of who that person is, relationships that person may have with other people and being able to maintain that connection and understanding.
Now, this does not necessarily imply that your 150 exist in a vacuum and thus only know the other people that you know. The 150 is not a closed circle. Certainly, there is overlap between the circles of 150 and often, the folks in your 150 may know large swaths of your 150.
Let’s take this concept back to Gladwell’s concept of the social connector from “The Tipping Point” and the tremendous value of these personalities that are capable of navigating many types of social groups and maintaining weak ties with many loosely affiliated individuals. They may not necessarily have the relationship within their social group that others may have, but they master the ability to maintain relationships with many folks from many social groups.
The reason I brought up the concept of the 150 was that our group was discussing new strategies of marketing. Our undergraduate full-time student population is in the range of 16,000. With some simple math, 16,000 students divided by 150 people in each social group gives you about 106 social groups that you must interact with in order for the message about your marketing. However, it’s much more complex than that due to overlap and interactions with multiple social groups that occurs. Basically, each of those 16,000 students has an independent social network of 150 that’s hard to determine overlap with the networks of others. It bears mentioning that each of these students is going to have networks of 150 that include high school friends, parents, people they work with off campus, etc, but let’s not get too caught up in technicalities, this is a thought experiment.
Let’s break down those numbers from a different angle. If we’re going to use the 80/20 principle to take a shot on who our social actors might be on campus, in a student population of approximately 16,000 students, in theory, 3200 students will be the social actors and those who grease the wheels of action on campus. The rest, in theory, will be the participants.
So, we have that you need to connect with at least 106 independent social groups or somehow connect with each individuals network of 150 (16,000 groups). And you somehow have to make sure that you are connecting with the 3,200 that are the social actors, the movers and shakers if you will.
Take heart though as you pursue this herculean task, I present the small world experiment, the idea behind 6 degrees of separation or 6 degrees of kevin bacon. The idea behind the 6 degrees of separation is that there are 6 degrees that connect every person in the world. People think “wow, that’s amazing”, but the truth is that the 6 degrees experiment found that the same individuals kept showing up in the 6 degrees. These folks are your connectors that I mentioned earlier and they’re the secret to effective campus marketing and effective outreach with students (or in life).
I must address this before I wind it up, but some might say that the optimal way to connect these people is through social media, and to a certain extent I agree. Through social media, the barriers for passing on information are lowered and people are able to pass along information to their connections with much less effort than word of mouth (and reach more people at once). But the difficulty with lowering a barrier is that it also lowers the importance of every message (think fidelity swap). Your important message can get lost in the deluge of other important messages and other nonsense (vera bradley bags, buckets of sunshine, star wars characters, cupcakes and people’s generalized fitness goals or check-ins to their place of business) and thus, not raise the attention of these connectors.
These connectors are actually fairly easy to recognize on social media though. One of my former students was definitely a connector. He has nearly 5,000 friends on facebook and managed to leverage his social network to land in the top 5 of the Oprah OWN Show contest, a truly amazing feat for someone who is not yet 22 years old. He has mastered that ability to make weak ties with folks, make them like him and maintain a semblance of connection with them and it’s truly a thing to watch.
I was trying to think of how you reach these connectors, but as I sit here pondering that question, I’m not sure that’s even the right question. I think you have to do enough marketing to reach these connectors and not just one, but all of the connectors on your campus. And then your idea that you’re trying to share, in order to gain traction, must have the element of cool or the element of convenience.
My other question is how to know on the back end of events and marketing if your idea was actually successful. From my readings of Dan Airely, it sounds like humans have a tendency to anchor themselves to numbers and then judge success or failure (read: quality) by that initial number. I wonder if that’s not foolish in this context. We have 16,000 students that have paid an activities fee and thus we have a moral obligation to do outreach marketing to all of those students about what we’re actually doing with their money as well as to provide some sort of activity that will be worth their while.
What I want to see at events is an overlap of these social circles. I want to see students that don’t know each other being forced to cross paths and interact in a way that they haven’t before. And ideally, I’d like to see them learn something new about themselves and about how to interact with people. The people that would make this interaction possible, it seems, are these connectors.
So when we’re thinking about marketing ideas and events, shouldn’t we be driving our marketing towards these connectors? What if we were to encourage our students to certainly post links on facebook about our events, but to specifically target (maybe with a post on their actual wall) those individuals that have a ton of facebook friends? Is it worth trying to create a social graph of some kind? I feel like our students might know who these people were if we just knew how to ask them. Just a thought. Rather than bombarding all students with more messages until it falls into drivel, maybe we should be more targeted, try to retain the fidelity of what we do, and thusly foster the social connections that we actually want.
A huge part of the reason I got into student activities and student center work is that I want to help others realize their dreams and passions. More than that, I want my life to be about helping others find and recognize the freedom that comes from finding one’s passion and pursuing that passion. You can read more about my ideas in this vein in my previous post here.
It’s for that reason I invest countless hours listening to students talk. It’s for that reason I stay in constant contact, it seems, with students and friends that I very rarely or may never again see listening to them talk and giving advice.
It’s for that reason that I support 3rd world citizens through Kiva (making micro-loans to help fund businesses in the 3rd world) and through Charity:Water (a huge first step to pursuing dreams is having the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid). These organizations help to set people’s dreams and goals free from the bounds of their situation. (full disclosure: i actually had tears running down my cheeks typing that last paragraph. I really believe in these causes. If you can participate, you should.)
And it’s for this reason that I’m supporting breakdrink.com. As a blogger and website maintainer and podcaster, I feel like I understand the incredible amount of work that Jeff and Gary put into their site. These guys aren’t just pushing a product though, they’re trying to help our profession to find it’s way through a dark hour and to emerge stronger and better. I can get behind that 100% as someone who not only believes in helping others to pursue their dreams and goals, but someone who personally benefits from the service that breakdrink.com provides and will provide.
That being said, go to indiegogo.com and donate to breakdrink.com’s future. Help push student affairs and higher ed forward. Help someone make their dream and passion a reality.
I always wonder about where this line lies. In the days of in loco parentis, we were obviously supposed to be hovering and doing things for students. But in 2010, in loco parentis is supposed (in theory) to not exist and not factor. I’d argue that it does.
With the threat of litigation, enormous bureaucracies to contend with, and legal questions of responsibility in the event something goes afoul, I think functionally we’ve inhibited our students ability to go about things their own way. We have to fight their battles for them, we have to take the fall and be responsible should something bad happen and we have to lead them through the maze of the university system.
It’s sad. It really is.
I believe that systems have the ability inhibit growth. It’s essentially the message of much of Malcolm Gladwell’s work – systems can be used for good or evil and I believe many times the systems in student affairs work against giving students the freedom to try and to fail and to take ownership. The staff is pressured to lead things, partly so there can be someone “responsible” (a bullshit idea that students can’t be that person) to blame when something goes wrong.
Systems become overwhelming to students because they are so complex that it can take a new staff member a year to learn them. How can a student be expected to learn them in 5-10 hours a week?
And I’m not even going to begin on the threat of litigation….
But shouldn’t we as staff work towards making what we do a more visible part of student learning? Shouldn’t we make the student learning that happens in student affairs more visible and work to eliminate systems that inhibit learning? Isn’t this our damn job?
I’ve hated most of the blogs I’ve written lately. I think I’ve hated them because I wasn’t being myself. Let me explain….
I don’t do student activities because I think it’s the best thing in the world. I don’t do student activities because I love playing bingo or setting up picnics or arranging late night dance parties. Let’s be honest, in the big scope of things in life, these kind of events are meaningless and a diversion.
I do student activities for bigger reasons. I do student activities because the students that get on the inside and participate can be set free from the bullshit that happens in the classroom, the pressures of families and friends and can really pursue their own interests and curiosities unabated in a way that’s completely different from ANYTHING else on campus.
Have a passion for social justice? Set up a service event or bring a speaker to talk about Darfur. Love music? Invite one of your favorite bands to rock out your campus. Politics more your gig? We’ve bought Cory Booker (the man! @corybooker) and Mike Huckabee to our campus this year. The possibilities are literally endless as well as the experiences.
I’m all about self-actualization and there are very few things that give the opportunity to self-actualize more than doing student activities, at least in it’s best form. I’d forgotten that in some of my latest blogs as I’ve tried to find my niche in the blogosphere. But you can’t write that way and expect to produce anything more than boring bilge. No more, my friends.
Draw on Chickering (FREE) 
Let’s backtrack.
mortgage industry with Wells Fargo. During my time there, I’d be admitted to grad school and the rest, as they say, is history.
something I love.
So, Chapter 3 starts where the IT guy warns me that he was nearing the end of his effectiveness, as, most likely, we didn’t have access to the student database that we needed to cross reference the IDs that we swiped so that we could actually make something reasonable out of the data other than just a collection of scrabble like number combinations. Quite literally, the data we were collecting would be useless without access to this database.
