Laurie Berry

Jamie & Ed chat with Laurie Berry, Director of Housing & Residence Life at the University of Southern Indiana, about starting PhD work while balancing work and life.  Laurie shares important insights on the current professional landscape for PhDs in the field of Residence Life.  Hot Topic of the week: Learning outcomes & assessment

Join Jamie and Ed tonight with guest Ziena Miller and Deb Schmidt-Rogers as they discuss making the move to a live-off position.

4:00 pm (CST)
Listen Live here BreakDrink Live

Ziena Miller is the Coordinator for the Department of Residential Education at DePaul University. Previously, she has worked at the University of Southern Indiana, was a graduate student in the Student Affairs program at Ball State University, and received her undergraduate degree at Georgia Southern University in Speech Communication. She is currently in her first live-off position, and spent a decade living on in total. She is married to a fellow Student Affairs professional, and life is nothing if not a fun adventure in our home!

Deb Schmidt-Rogers has been active in the higher education community for more than 25 years. She currently serves as Director of Residential Education at DePaul University in Chicago where she has worked for the past 18 years. Prior to working at DePaul she was employed at The Catholic University of America and Trinity College in Washington, D.C. She holds a B.S. in Biology and an M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology and Higher Education from Loyola University Chicago. She will begin her term as Inclusion and Equity Director on the Executive Board of ACUHO-I in July 2011. She is active in both her neighborhood and church communities. Deb is married to Chris and has two children Nate (20) and Maddie (14).

Amanda Kraus

Just when you think you have run out of podcasting first something happens…we get our first prank call courtesy of the 970 area code.

On Duty was also joined by Amanda Kraus from the University or Arizona discussing social justice programing in residence halls.

Did you miss the premiere of Jamie and Ed’s new podcast On Duty? Here is your second chance to hear it.

Catch the preview of our new podcast focused on Residence Life. It will be premiering Thursday 7:00 pm (CST) after the weekly BreakDrink podcast at 6:30.

The host of the Res Life Podcast are:

Jamie Workman is a Coordinator of Residence Life at Miami University, and a student in the Higher Education PhD program at Ohio University. She’s been working in Res Life for 12 years, and have loved (almost) every minute of it! For fun, Jamie likes traveling, spending time with friends, and playing with her dog Sugar.

Ed Gilhool serves as the Associate Director of the Office of Residence Life at Georgetown University.  He has worked in Residence Life, both at public and private institutions, for nearly 10 years and has particular interest in student conduct, emergency management, student leadership and social justice education.

You can listen to the show here live.

Sunday night as I was surfing through my alerts when I discovered several articles discussing the Census and Residence Halls. I sent out a message on twitter and got a great response.  Here is the response I got from Lynn Ellison, Res Life professional extraordinaire.

On Sunday, I noticed the following tweet from Jeff: “I’m seeing several articles about Dept of Res Life offices promoting the census. Is that happening on your campus?” Several of us responded that we were taking an active role in disseminating information about the census to our students and encouraging participation.  Then Jeff asked a question I couldn’t answer: have we as a profession always been this active in the census?

I posted a very informal poll on my facebook status and was reminded that in 2000, when I worked at UNC-Chapel Hill, we had our RAs distribute the census information to the residents personally.  I have absolutely no memory of this – I suspect that I don’t remember because I wasn’t exposed to a near-constant stream of census information as I am today. This year it seems, as Joe Biden would say, like a big deal.

A lot has changed in marketing and social media since 2000.  Remember: the concept of “social media” is a fairly recent development.  Facebook didn’t even exist until 2004 (and then it was only open to a few select schools).   Cell phones were just starting to tip into common usage (I was literally the only one on my staff with a cell phone in 2000).

Now,  thanks to social media, we’ve all become part of the Census Bureau’s marketing campaign.  How many of your connections posted updates when they completed their census form?  And did you feel compelled to complete it and then “tweet” it?  I sure did.  One of my facebook friends works for the census bureau and posted a reminder on her status.  She received several comments that said “done!” We can even track census participation through http://2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/.  Thanks to this report, I know that Dubuque City, IA has the highest participation rate at 73%.  We won’t talk about Texas’ participation rate.

All this to say – I think universities may be just as involved in facilitating census participation this year as in years past.  We just hear more about our efforts thanks to the pervasiveness of social media.

Loyola University Maryland will be adding additional housing communities that will provide learning around students interest. Loyola has named the new communities Mission house and Wellness House. The Greyhound reports…

Mission House is a community that strives to live out the core values of our Jesuit education. The students who live in this community will participate in “activities that will strengthen their commitment to service and spirituality.

Wellness House, a house that strives to create healthy decisions and alternatives for alcohol, and Ad Infinitum, a sophomore living community that helps sophomore navigate through their sophomore year…

This is not only a great learning opportunity for students, but for the residential staff that will be able to program around their passions. I would imagine staff retention would be higher in learning communities compared to other hall director positions. Do you know of other schools with similar learning communities?

Last week I discovered an article about South Dakota State disconnecting their phones lines from residence halls.  Today I discovered a similar article about Concordia University which will save them about $200,000 a year. It caused me to think…how common is this so I decided to do  a poll.

Does your campus still provide phone service in residence halls?

I have not had a home phone line in years, so it did not occur to me that universities still provided phone lines in their residence halls. Earlier this week there was a article on kotatv.com that said…

In a cost cutting measure, the University of South Dakota is getting rid of dorm room phones after finding more than 80 percent of students don’t bother to use them, opting for cell phones instead.

Eliminating phones in residence halls will save USD $168,000 annually.

About South Dakota State:
According to the USD website their undergraduate enrollment is 7,098 and 25% of the undergraduate population lives on campus.

It seems that many of the recent stories in student affairs have been in the residence life area. USA Today reports a study that finds

…that students in coed dorms are far more likely than those in single-sex dorms to drink alcohol regularly – and nearly 2½ times as likely to drink to excess on a weekly basis.

There were 510 students that participated in the study and 442 (87%) lived in coeducational housing.  Using my basic math skills that means the comparison was only against 68 students that lived in single-sex housing. I think I would like to see a more even comparison.

What are you thought? Does the study seem accurate? Do you see flaws in the survey?