Next year’s leaders

2016-2017 Resident Assistants revealed after two-week evaluation process

With more than 450 applicants and only 120 Resident Assistant (RA) positions for the 2016-2017 school year, deciding who should fill those positions is no easy task.

Dustin DuBose, director of student leadership, and his team of Assistant Directors (AD) and Resident Directors (RD) worked diligently to ensure the best decisions were made.

DuBose said that the two weeks between Experience Weekend and RA placement are filled with deliberation and discussion.

“Most of it is amassing our paperwork and getting everything together in order to do second cuts, make the decisions and run the meetings.” DuBose said. “The RDs will talk back and forth a lot about what they saw during the weekend and host week and talk together about what is going to be the best option for any particular applicant.”

He said their priority during that time is compiling all of their data so when they do make the decisions, they will be well informed and will have discussed everything thoroughly.

While the current RAs do play a role in determining who is best qualified for a position, the decision is ultimately not up to them.

“Once we get to the actual meeting, it is the RDs, the ADs and myself,” DuBose said. “The RAs give us a lot of information in discussions with their RDs, but when we sit down to discuss who should and who should not be offered a position, the RDs present their home applicants to the ADs saying, ‘This is who I think should make it,’ and then we confirm that decision, or if we have questions we ask and just discuss until we come to a decision.”

These decisions are based on what the RDs and ADs observed over Host Week and Experienced Weekend. They were looking at each applicant’s character and competence to determine if they would be a good fit for the position.

Many positions similar to the RA would be filled by standard interviews, but the Office of Student Leadership likes to do things differently.

“(Experience Weekend) gives us a good view of the applicant outside their home environment where they live on the hall,” DuBose said. “It provides a quality control mechanism in some senses.”

DuBose also said it gives them a baseline to go off of when planning training for next year. They can see their new applicants’ strengths and weaknesses, which help them decide what to focus on when the RAs return for training in August.

DuBose had two pieces of advice for anyone wanting to apply for an RA position next year.“Talk to your current RAs,”

DuBose said. “Look at what they’re doing, discuss their decision making with them. Think about what you want to accomplish with the students on your hall. Obviously there’s the administrative portions of RA, but there’s also the relationships with the people on the floor, leading and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do together.’”

Any students who are interested in more information about any of the student leadership positions can go online to liberty.edu/osl.

GEE is a news reporter.