The Assignment:To create a profile story for the web. We were to select an individual of interest, interview them, and write a feature story about them. Doing this assignment helped me make my writing clearer; ambiguity could mislead an audience. It also taught me the nuances of news writing. For example, news writing requires short sentences and short paragraphs to make the information easier to digest. Finally, it taught me what goes in to a story for the web. Not only do you provide a story, but you provide additional information linked to the story in order to give the reader a more holistic experience.
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McCormick, meet JennyJennifer Steiner, McCormick Hall Director, is glad to work at Marquette and plans to make improvements to freshman dorm life using her experience as a Hall Director at Ohio State University.
the classes. She remembers moving in to her dorm. Her building was four stories tall with no elevator, and her parents helped her move everything up the stairs. She remembered her mom telling her, “Well, we can’t set up your internet, but we saw this cute [Resident Assistant] and told him to help you set it up.”
“I was never an RA as an undergrad,” Jenny told me. Not that she has anything against the position; it was her way of rebelling against her mother, who pestered her to apply. “I’m also not creative enough to do that job,” she said. “Your bulletin boards are great. Mine would have been... Well, there’s a reason my apartment isn’t decorated.” She also didn’t feel the need to become an RA to enjoy the satisfaction of building a community. Jenny worked on the orientation staff as a student orientation coordinator, which entailed supervising 36 of her peers whom she lived with over the summer. “I had to organize programs and speak with parents and students,” she said, “so even though I didn’t have experience being a hall director, I had experience doing something very similar.” When a friend encouraged her to work in housing as a graduate student, she applied at Ohio State University and became an assistant hall director in a 550-person scholar student dorm. Becoming an RHD It was there that she became a residence hall director. Halfway through the year, Jenny’s supervisor left and she got promoted. The next year, she moved to a building that was about the size of Marquette’s McCormick. She said that although larger buildings are higher-incident, she had some really good moments working at Ohio State.
“I remember this thing called the Mirror Lake jump, which is when students get decked out in minimal clothing and jump into the lake before the Michigan-Ohio game,” Jenny told me. “It was so surreal, people were chanting and I got to the lake thinking this was crazy!” Every RA staff is on full duty on the night of the Mirror Lake jump, although each group of RAs gets half an hour to head down to the lake and jump in if they wish. Students often get so muddy that they have to be hosed off before they can come back inside the building. “We had a guy get documented for naked slip-n-sliding in my hall that night,” Jenny remembered with a laugh. Her job description Part of being a residence hall director is having conduct meetings with students who get documented. Jenny said that in such a big building, those meetings can take up a lot of her day. “I have conduct meetings, department meetings, RHD meetings, hall council stuff, committee meetings, faculty meetings, and nighttime commitments like e-board meetings... My week is pretty packed, but I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jenny emphasized. She’s not the type of person who enjoys having nothing to do. She fills almost her entire week with residence hall activities, although she said that she works out every day as time for herself.
“I think the only way I can really effectively do this job is if I maintain that balance,” she said. “People are really surprised to see how much work we do, and that I need a Masters degree to work with college students.” Jenny transferred into higher education from speech pathology after her experience on orientation staff at Western. “It’s funny how it all worked out,” she said. Jenny actually wanted to go to Marquette for speech pathology. “I cried when my mom told me we couldn’t afford Marquette,” Jenny recalled, “and Western had just as good of a speech pathology program so I decided to go there.” She said that if she hadn’t gone through her experiences at Western, she probably wouldn’t be working at Marquette now. “I was supposed to be here, just six years later,” she joked. Working at Marquette Jenny told me how much she loves working in McCormick. “I get to work with some great student leaders,” she said. “Also, [Marquette] doesn’t really have very many mental health cases; last year there was one student who got removed from [Western] by administration, and went on to stalk her previous RA until the police got involved.... I would take a bunch of alcohol violations any day over that sort of thing.”
Although Jenny loves her current place of work, she does have some changes she wants to make. “McCormick has a negative reputation campus-wide, so I’ve been trying my best to promote that positive image through programming,” she said. “I was at this meeting and some guy asked me where I worked, and when I said ‘McCormick,’ he said ‘Good luck.’ I don’t think that looking at it like an 800-student dilemma is the right attitude,” she said, obviously annoyed. Jenny believes that her efforts are effective; there are a lot of wings in McCormick with hardly any incident reports. She thinks that the culture of McCormick can go from party dorm to learning experience if more opportunities are provided to the students, and that the staff shouldn’t give up because of the dorm’s past reputation. Jenny also wants to invite more faculty into McCormick to enhance the living/learning aspect of on-campus housing. Although Jenny puts a lot of her time into keeping McCormick running, to the point where she describes it as more of a lifestyle than a job, she doesn’t expect any recognition. She told me, “There’s a reason I do what I do... I enjoy student interaction, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” |