Community Building
Expectations
Reflection
Community building is of utmost importance for any RA, but especially so in the Suites area where residents tend to stay within their already-defined groups. It has been an interesting challenge building the Mandell Family Hall community this year, especially given the wonderful communities I lived in last year--the Sophomore Steering Tower and the Coleman first floor. While I definitely feel like I knew my residents better last year, I've learned a lot about really taking the initiative to knock on people's doors and just engage in conversation.
Community building is of utmost importance for any RA, but especially so in the Suites area where residents tend to stay within their already-defined groups. It has been an interesting challenge building the Mandell Family Hall community this year, especially given the wonderful communities I lived in last year--the Sophomore Steering Tower and the Coleman first floor. While I definitely feel like I knew my residents better last year, I've learned a lot about really taking the initiative to knock on people's doors and just engage in conversation.
My personalized name tags for each resident, consistent programming, and little messages throughout the semester certainly helped, but my main goal for this semester is to better connect suites with one another. As I said before, it's much harder to get residents to break out of their suites, but people still seem happy and I have seen a lot more conversation--even just small talk--in the hallways so that has been nice as well.
In the SRA role, it would be important to build a community among an area's staff as the RAs must first be able to work together before being able to collaborate and succeed within their residence halls. I've lived in three very different communities throughout my time at Babson, and given this experience, I hope to do my best in building unique residence hall communities moving forward.
Last Fall, I took a group of about 10 Coleman residents out trick-or-treating just as a fun way to come together and this was our bounty :)
Organizing a community-building outing to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter!
S.S. '13 Homecoming Team - a great way for us to learn more about each other early on in the semester.
Always let the community know that you are thinking about all of the residents within it--even a simple message can go a long way!
