Some resident assistants aren’t treated like they should be.
Rontina McCann
The lighter side
he most under appreciated and overworked employees at West Virginia University
aren’t professors or administrators. It’s your fellow students who are
resident assistants.
RA’s, as we all know them, work extremely hard to maintain the position they’re in.
This past year I worked as an RA on the Downtown Campus. I came in August for RA training, which consisted of long meetings, team building with staff, learning how to swipe someone’s I.D. (yes, this was a workshop) and learning how to properly use a fire extinguisher. If the truth were known, if the building I worked in were legitimately on fire I would run across the street and sit on frat row until the flames were extinguished. I can be heroic, but not stupid.
I was so pumped when school began, when I would get to meet the residents I would work directly with. I planned floor socials like trips to Cooper’s Rock, outings to downtown establishments, watching the first ever male beauty pageant in America and stuffing many boxes of pizza and too many girls in my room for “Ladies Night.”
I thought I met the standards of any other RA in the system, but the support wasn’t there. It didn’t matter if I came to desk shift early and met the proper program requirements, it was never enough. I, along with other staff members, were treated as though we would never be good enough.
As an RA, you get room and board paid for, a double room to yourself and if you are a rookie, $100 a month. Returning RAs receive $120 a month.
The workload was fine for all the perks involved. We each had one duty night a week, the occasional weekend shift and insanely long staff meetings on Sunday nights.
In December, when I looked back on the fall semester, I realized the stress brought on by supervisors really wasn’t worth the benefits I received.
When the spring term began I wasn’t as motivated to work, and I took on the mentality of wondering what was the use in trying if I was just going to get ridiculed no matter how much effort I put into it.
That was the wrong attitude for me to take. Lately, I’ve realized I wasn’t in the wrong. I met all expectations asked of me in the job description.
The job of an RA wasn’t created for upperclassmen to have their social and educational lives halted whenever someone needed written up or the desk needed coverage. The primary goal isn’t policing the hallways as regulators or to be the “resident’s mama.”
In my opinion, the job of a resident assistant is to promote student activities and involvement on campus, while maintaining a comfortable learning environment for their building. The job of a resident assistant was created to financially aid outgoing and personable students who want to pay for college on their own, live in the dorms and represent their school in a positive manner to incoming students.
I believe that University regulations should be followed as everything in the “ResEd Eyes and ’Eers” policy manual is there for student’s safety and that is important.
I know many of you are thinking, “stop your whining, just don’t work as an RA again next year and the problem will be solved.”
Don’t worry, I’m not. I’m living in a cute little house in the South Park area. I couldn’t handle having my liberty taken away one more year.
The purpose of this column is to express that ResEd needs to re-evaluate how they treat their RA’s because they’ve let so many good ones slip through the cracks. In my building, 11 RA’s didn’t make it through the year. There are only 22 positions. This statistic proves that there is a problem in the system.
I was advised by several people not to write this column, but I read somewhere that “little good is ever accomplished without controversy, and no civil evil is ever defeated without publicity.”
McCann is a staff writer for The Daily Athenaeum. She can be reached at 293-5092 or at daperspectives.com.
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