In this episode of the podcast, guest host Dustin Ramsdell chats with Abby Groth, a current Roompact blogger from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln about her unique journey from art museums to residence life and how she’s using that perspective to reimagine student support. Abby shares how learning communities, peer mentorship, and early intervention surveys are transforming the student experience and contributing to academic success outside the classroom. She also gets candid about what doesn’t work—and why residence life doesn’t need to do it all.
Guest: Abby Groth (she/her/hers), Associate Director of Residence Life at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Host: Dustin Ramsdell, Independent Higher EdTech Content Creator
Listen to the Podcast:
Watch the Video:
Show Notes:
None.
Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back, everyone, to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. If you’re new to the show, every episode, our team of hosts brings you at timely discussions on a variety of topics of interest to higher professionals who work in and with university housing, residence life, residential education. So this is another in our series that we like to do every year, highlighting our wonderful blogging team, a diverse crew of professionals from all over the country, writing on a variety of topics. So you may have hopefully seen their writing, but we kind of dig a little bit deeper, kind of get a little warm personal touch to who they are, what they’re writing about, and hopefully, just bridging some connections to keep the conversation going with our bloggers here. So Abby, you are joining us. If you want to start us off, as we always do, just having a brief introduction of yourself and your professional background, and then we can get on with the rest of our discussion.
Abby Groth:
Great. Hi, my name’s Abby Groth. I am pleased to be here today, on my very first podcast. This is an exciting moment for me. I am coming here from Lincoln, Nebraska, where I work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in residence life, particularly with our learning communities, our residential curriculum, and our academic partnerships, both within residence life, but also our broader housing program as well. I’ve been in this position since 2019. I made a hard left in my career, from the world of art museums and art education.
My formal educational background is in art history, so I made the jump over to student affairs about three months before COVID, and then had a very weird first year in this world, and haven’t really looked back ever since. It has really become a new professional home for me, that I hadn’t been expecting in my life, but it has worked out really well, and I have found a lot of similarities between the work that I did in the art museum before coming over here to student affairs, so it doesn’t feel as disjointed in my mind as it might on the surface. So yeah, that’s where I’m coming from today.
Dustin Ramsdell:
That’s great. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. I’m just naturally curious, I guess, of just what drew you into this world, because I feel like sometimes, a lot of people, it’s like you either start here or you never come here kind of thing, of people being an RA, or whatever else. So do you have any of that part of your background, or what drew you in, I guess? Because I think it could be if you were interested in working at an institution, there could have been a lot of ways to do that, so what was maybe that initial germ of the idea that sort of pulled you into residence life?
Abby Groth:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I did not have the traditional Res Life background. I kind of always joke, I think I knew my freshman year RA, but I don’t remember any of my other RAs. I was probably not the ideal student. I don’t remember going to hall programs, and doing all that stuff. So now, of course, I’m totally into the positive benefits of being involved in your residence hall community, and I wish that I would’ve been a little bit more, I don’t know, paid a little more attention when I was in college. But no, I came from a totally different background. Like I said, I went through undergrad and got my master’s in art history, and I was working at the University of Nebraska, at the Sheldon Museum of Art, which is our campus’ primary art museum, and I really enjoyed what I did there. I worked in the education department and helped plan public programs, and worked with classes when they came into the museum.
And so some of the things that really appealed to me about that position were the idea of a museum, or a gallery, as a laboratory space, so it’s more of an informal learning environment, but still an environment where students are really getting a chance to explore important skills, like critical thinking and seeing things from other perspectives, and understanding social or cultural moments through a different lens. And maybe, in a way, because they’re faced with these visual prompts in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily experience in the classroom on a regular basis, so that idea of gallery as laboratory really appealed to me. And I think there’s a mix of practical considerations and larger life fulfillment considerations that drew me to start looking at other positions on campus. One of the main things that I felt didn’t get as fulfilled in my job at the museum, is that we would have classes come, we’d work with them, but then the students would leave and I wouldn’t necessarily get to see them again.
So that long-term relationship building wasn’t built into my position there, and so that was something I was really interested in pursuing. And learning communities, it was an assistant director of learning communities position that opened up, and I didn’t really know what learning communities were, but after some digging, I learned more about the program, and I thought this seems like an avenue that I could pursue. I understand the concept that they’re going for here, of this academic support system, social support system coming together. In a way, it feels like the residence hall is also a laboratory for learning, and so I kind of started to connect these dots in my head, and sort of just went for it. I think some of it was just looking for something different. I had been in the museum for a few years, and just wanted to try something new, and it felt like the right time in my personal life to make a move.
And when I came over to Residence Life, and started really digging into it, I think that idea of this is a site for learning in a way that is different than the classroom, of course, is different than a formal STEM lab of course, but is really a zone where… I mean, students spend more time here than they do in their classroom over the course of an academic year, so it stands to reason that some of those really important developmental moments are going to happen in our spaces, how can we set them up for making the most of that time? So, I really felt like that thread that was important to me, of helping students learn outside of the classroom, could be carried through, and that gives me a lot of personal fulfillment. I also really enjoy, coming from a humanities background, I’m always interested in these interdisciplinary environments, and connecting things that seem disparate but maybe have more in common, or there’s a thread that you can sew from one to the next, and with a learning community, that’s something that happens a lot.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that full story and context, and everything, because I do think it perfectly sets up our topic of conversation today, around just examining the impact on academic success and the academic experience of students in the halls, and everything. So we’ll get to that in a moment, but we always like to ask too, you’re on the blogging team, it is kind of a unique experience that a lot of folks are going on with you currently, and have done in the past, and we’ve highlighted, and want to uplift the stories or what was the motivation, inspiration for taking the leap. So what inspired you to want to join the Roompact blogging team?
Abby Groth:
Roompact is a pretty new software to me. We, at our institution here, at UNL, we just started using Roompact in the fall of 2024. But I was part of a small team that was investigating some different options for basically, community management softwares, and so we demoed with a couple of different companies, and it pretty quickly became clear that Roompact was going to be the tool to solve. No tool is perfect, but it got as close as possible to solving pretty much every problem, and everything that we wanted to be tracking and managing online. So I had myself and a couple other colleagues were some of the early folks to dig into what Roompact looked like, and all of the features that it could offer, so I feel like even before it was brought to our full department, I had a good sense of what it could do and the strength that it could provide to our team.
And because in my role, I shepherd our residential curriculum, and really help do a lot of the work behind the scenes for some of our assessment projects. I probably am one of the people that has the most at stake when it comes to Roompact. My work is easy if the data is good and people are using it appropriately, so I really felt invested heavily from a early stage. So in terms of joining the blogging team, I thought this is a great opportunity to remain involved with a company that has thus far, provided a really interesting experience, like bringing our university on board and setting us up for success, and I was really impressed with that whole process. And then I also just saw this as a great professional development experience for myself.
It’s really easy to let professional development fall to the bottom of the to-do list. I think everyone in student affairs has said that at one point or another, that, “Oh, I mean to do this or that,” or “I want to be the type of person that reads a peer-reviewed article every week, or listens to all these podcasts, or takes online classes, watches the webinars,” and it’s just easy for that kind of stuff to fall off the to-do list when you have a million other things knocking at your door. So I felt like this was a good way to keep myself on a regular schedule, because I knew that if I was going to be writing a blog post, then there’s probably going to be some amount of homework or research, or at least just brushing up on some ideas, so it felt like a great way to dovetail my professional development with staying involved with a group, an organization that felt really relevant to what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. And I think that’s a great way to approach something like this, because there is the aspect of, yeah, doing some your prep work and pulling together things for each piece of writing, but then even to teach is to learn twice kind of thing of, “Okay, if I have to coherently put all this together, that reinforces learning,” and there being a sense of obligation following through and meeting the commitment that you’re making, and all of those, I think, being good pillars that would uplift, yeah, it not being something that just sort of slides away and doesn’t get prioritized. And yeah, I mean I think it has always just been enjoyable for me, in the experiences that I’ve had like that, to get closer to an organization, and those folks there and what they’re doing, and the impact they’re making, and so there’s other kind of tertiary benefits as well.
But again, our topic here, broadly, about academic success, I think something that you uplifting as a point of conversation here, and I think certainly, you’re going on your own learning journey through this experience, and that we obviously are, through residential curriculums and everything, wanting to support student learning, but I don’t think we’ve really strongly had a specific episode yet that is really tethered to, “Okay, well the students are here, taking a load of courses, pursuing their degree, we want to be not detrimental to that. We want to be in service of that.” Because it’s like things in the student affairs world, I think there can be partly naysayers, where it’s like, “Okay, you just got to have pizza parties all the time or something,” or whatever. Students should be studying all the time.
So I think we’re going to go on both sides of the coin here, of talking about how residential life can support academic success, and the things that either, I guess, can either hinder it, or maybe just aren’t as effective as impacting and supporting academic success. So we’ll start on the positive side. I think what you’re alluding to, of certainly, the top of the pile here, is living learning communities is just a classic method here. So we can certainly elaborate on that more, and we’ve explored it before on the show, but what are the ways that you have seen residential life supporting students’ academic success?
Abby Groth:
Yeah, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with learning communities. I maybe won’t go super into depth, because that’s probably a topic that’s been explored in some other podcasts more in depth. But one of the features of University of Nebraska’s learning community program, that I really believe adds to the success of our program here, is our peer mentor staff. So our learning communities each have faculty and staff sponsors in the department that’s associated with the topic of the learning community, and then peer mentors associated with that community as well. So students are receiving support from a couple of different levels. They’re receiving that professional support from a faculty or staff who are experts in the field, and are really ingrained in the opportunities available through their academic department, and can open up students to their own professional networks, provide a lot of valuable advice, in terms of career development or exploration, especially for first-year students.
And all of our learning communities at Nebraska are first-year student communities, so there are definitely a lot of students who are still in that exploratory phase. They’re just figuring out what does it mean to be a mechanical engineer? What does it mean to be a pre-health student? There’s a lot of ways you can go with that designation. So our professional staff and faculty provide an amazing layer of support. Our peer mentors are often part of the same college or major. Some of our learning communities have pretty broad categories, so the majors might not match up one-to-one for every single student, but they really provide a different angle of support. They are a little bit more of the boots on the ground, “I’m giving you some really practical, transparent advice about the program that you’re in right now,” down to “If you’re this type of learner, this faculty will be great for you in this course. Here’s a class that I really recommend because it gave me the opportunity to go on all these site visits.”
Or sometimes, the other way around too, like “I would avoid this class if you can avoid it.” As a professional staff, I try not to get too in the weeds with what kind of advice they’re giving their mentees, but they’re the ones who have just lived it one year ago, or one semester ago, and so then they’re giving this really immediate, really responsive to the environment advice and guidance to their mentees, and I think that’s something they would really have a hard time receiving from a professional staff member, even one in residence life, who, I think, we like to pride ourselves on being pretty in tune with what students are desiring and interested in. So the mentors really are able to respond to each student’s needs and learning styles, and also just everything else that’s going on in their life, and weave together that personal and academic life and how to navigate that when you’re a student.
And then a lot of our mentors also serve in sort of a tutoring capacity. So we might have study groups that form out of our weekly floor hours, which are like office hours for the mentors, and so then that becomes another layer of that academic support within our learning communities. I know there’s definitely other schools out there that have peer mentors for their learning communities, but I think that’s one of the pieces of our model that really works well, and is one of our points of pride, in terms of why we feel like our learning communities are pretty successful. So that’s our learning communities.
Dustin Ramsdell:
I’ll just stop you there, because I think there’s so much power in that, because I think it brings a lot of intentionality into what may end up just being anecdotal or re-filtered, and they should come, or whatever the idea, a lot of presumptions that folks might have, of like, “Well, we have tutoring,” or “We have these coaches or mentors,” or whatever else. But them being right there, and I’m sure some schools have neither, some maybe have one or the other, of faculty or peer mentors. I think it’s great to hear that you have both, because I think… And then even the structured time, because I know some people, it’s more helpful for them to have the set office hours kind of time, and other people, it’s like, “Well, I need it more on demand,” or whatever. But I don’t know. So I think those sort of… Yeah, the broad strokes of living learning communities, I’m glad that they’ve entrenched themselves as this more traditional classical kind of way to approach this sort of thing.
And I think I’m hoping that they just continue to persist and expand, because I think certainly, with the way that you frame them as well, having them be more catered towards a new student, they would hopefully be really forming some good habits, good community, and confidence, and all those sort of things. But then I think the other ways of how residence halls and residential living positively impacts academic success, it’s just the parts of it that are just almost like in the background of quiet hours or study spaces, and all that. Because I think we did an episode recently, about the marketing of residence life, and that experience and everything. It is still, I think, something where… And I guess it still holds a lot of just the inherent value that’s irrefutable, that it’s always had, of just the fun and the social connections, and all that.
But I think depending on who your audience is, or the institution, you may need to lean into, “If you want to try to make the most of your investment of pursuing your degree here, choose to live on campus for the convenience, for the support.” It’s just very strong safety net to make sure that just the day-to-day is easier, and that there’s people that may notice if it’s like, “Oh, it seems like you’re a little stressed out,” or “You haven’t come out of your room a lot,” or whatever. That in all ways, because I think you’re even acknowledging that as well, it’s like it’s much about just like, “Oh, yeah, you’re preparing for this midterm and this one class, let me help you with that.”
But it could be just full 360 kind of support, where it is, if it’s like, “Okay, well, you’re doing well in your courses, you feel like you’ve got a good handle on all the concepts that you’re trying to learn, but you just may need to help manage your stress better or feel like you’re not so isolated,” or whatever else, that the people there care, and will help you with whatever you need to the best of their ability. So I think there’s just a lot of very tactical things, the very emotional things, that, I mean certainly, not limited to a living learning community, but would add to it, of just living in a residence hall means that you have quiet hours and certain rules and policies, and all that, that help, I think, facilitate a positive learning environment, and then the added benefit of all the details of the living learning community.
I think just to keep us moving along, I think it may just be the contrast and the opposite of much of what we spoke about, but from your experience, are there things that maybe, it could even just be this idea of things that people think work but don’t actually work as well as they think when they’re trying to craft a living experience for students when it comes to academic success, just what comes to mind, I guess, as some of the other sort of pitfalls to avoid in this area?
Abby Groth:
Sure. I mean, I think there’s some natural challenges when you have 1,200 students living in the same building, to making sure everyone always has a quiet environment for studying. That’s not possible, right? That’s just too many humans to be able to control that tightly, so I think there’s some natural challenges there. Distractions are easy, that sort of thing. But I also think in an era where residence life departments are really trying to emphasize their academic interest, or emphasize their ability to play a key role in the academic success of students, sometimes we find ourselves almost like trying too hard, or wading into territory where maybe we don’t have the expertise needed to really provide the right kind of support for students, and then sometimes, it’s also just a matter of duplicating services that already exist.
So I’ll give an example from this past academic year, we had a couple of student staff that we wanted to hire as peer mentors, but we had too many, and so we thought, “Well, maybe we could hire them as tutors.” We could just have this general learning community tutoring program, where these students are… I think both of them were from engineering, so they had the skills to be able to tutor in chem and physics and math, and some of the key courses that a lot of our first-year students take. And while they certainly did serve some students, it wasn’t as heavily used as we had anticipated, or hoped, and I think that there’s probably a number of reasons for that. One was that these folks weren’t attached to a specific learning community, so that relational aspect that students have with their mentor, who sees them on a really regular basis, that wasn’t there. They were really more of an external resource for students to plug into as needed.
But also, I think our tutoring centers on campus are really strong, and so our students were probably more likely to just go to the actual chem resource center, or the actual math resource center on campus, even though they were in a different building, all the way across campus. We thought maybe the convenience factor would trump the desire to have to trek across campus. But I think in the end, students saw that as maybe the more reliable, trustworthy, relevant source for their tutoring services. So in reflection on that whole effort, what I learned is that while we wanted to be able to offer this service, it was already being offered on campus in a really successful manner. And we don’t have to do everything, so we don’t have to try to recreate the wheel in-house, just to say that we have it in-house. So that struck me as one thing that… And I’m not sure it’s a hindrance of academic success, but maybe just something that didn’t work as well as we thought it would for our particular campus, because we do have some really strong tutoring centers in the departments in the colleges.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. That just brings to mind for me, half the battle sometimes, is just awareness of things. Like you can be of service by just highlighting and uplifting things that are already available to the students, versus yeah, like you’re saying, recreating the wheel, or sort of duplicating, or whatever else.
Abby Groth:
Yeah. And I think the tutoring services on campus have really improved over the last few years too, so students are more willing to go to them. When I first started in this job, I heard more mixed reviews on whether those centers were really the most valuable to students, and I think they’ve gotten a lot better, at least in this… That’s all say, so that’s mostly just our students’ feedback anecdotally. But it feels like now, whatever they’re doing right now is working well, and so we don’t need to try to do what they’re already doing really well.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. And I think part of it is that examination of what is it about particular things that is most appealing, and it’s like, okay, I would imagine, yeah, in a tutoring situation, you want the person who knows it the best, so credibility, and that sort of thing. It could be that idea of, “Yeah, I got 150% grade in this course,” so it’s like, “I know my stuff. I got all the extra credit,” and whatever else. You’re like, “Oh, my God, yeah, I want to get tutoring from you.” Even though it’s like, “Well, we’ve got people right here, they’re ready to go,” whatever else. Because I think a certain thing, like with food or something, could be like, “Hey, you could eat here right now for $2.00,” or whatever it was. It’s like, “I don’t know. It seems weird.” But it’s like, oh, downtown there’s this super expensive place, or whatever, people would be lined up out the door. There’s this value of maybe exclusivity, or whatever.
It depends on what it is, of how do I denote value that I’m going to get what I’m looking for, or whatever else. I mean, yeah, you obviously have to rely sometimes on the anecdotal experience of students, and maybe you can try to do some surveying, or whatever else, to gather that information. But I think, yeah, there can be pitfalls, in the sense of just presumptions of just like, “Oh, I’m sure the convenience will be the most important thing.” And it’s like, “Well, okay, maybe not,” and that’s that idea of not being so beholden to that, and resources being limited. It’s just like, “Well, if we’re doing that, we can’t do something else, so we could scrap something if it’s not working, and just pivot and go elsewhere.”
So I think that it’s a good story to highlight that dynamic, because I think the only other things I could imagine in this area, is I think some of what you’re maybe alluding to, but yeah, just sometimes the environment, and if you are almost like… Because I think, yeah, you wouldn’t want to be overly punitive, because the idea of it’s a lot of people, it’s going to be hard to have it be super quiet all the time. We might need to really go from the more [inaudible 00:28:01] pervasive examples of people violating quiet hours, or whatever. But then if you were over-programming, and that could almost be sort of a distraction, of just being like, “Well, we’re doing all this educational programming, we’re really helping the living learning community flourish,” or whatever else. It’s like, yeah, but you’re pulling students away from other, whatever, or having a lot of distractions. You’re creating the noise, or whatever.
That could just be that other pitfall, is trying to, and I’ve been through this podcast, and I think just this sort of paradigm shift from when I was an RA, of really being, a lot of departments being much more focused on trying to be more proactive, the intentional conversations, like more one-on-one touch points, and that sort of personal touch of things, versus just being the more bigger programs, the better. It’s like, well, we can be building just these very authentic, meaningful relationships with students. You could probably catch that they’re feeling homesick, they’re struggling to keep up with everything, and whatever else, and you can try to address those things early on, versus it being just completely reactive, of like, “Oh, my gosh, I just flunked my midterm. What do I do?” It’s like, “Oh, well, I mean we have tutors, we have all this stuff,” whatever. It’s like, “Well, it would’ve been great to be checking in with that student prior to the midterm to make sure that they do well.”
And again, you can never guarantee all those things, but even just if it’s like, “Oh, I’ve never spoken to the student. They’re not freaking out because they failed a midterm,” and now we’re trying to make up for that, and also try to get to know them and build a relationship. It’s like you’d hopefully be able to prime the pump a little bit better with these sort of things, so I think that could be just another pitfall.
Abby Groth:
Yeah. On that note, I think one thing that comes to mind for me, is we have a campus-wide initiative called our Husker Student Power Survey. This goes out in the fourth week of the semester, and it’s a very short survey of 10 statements, where students respond yes or no. So the statements might be things like “I am experiencing financial distress,” or “I’m worried about one or more of my classes,” and then various departments on campus, or units, follow up with students who respond in the negative to those statements. But one of the questions is, “I have found a friend at the university,” and all of the students who say, “No, I haven’t found a friend,” Residence Life does the direct one-to-one follow up for that. And I think your point that you’ve kind of made a couple of times here, is that academic success isn’t just about going to class and getting appropriate grade and moving on to the next course in the sequence to your degree, it’s all these other things that are going on in someone’s life that are going to affect whether they can actually do that academic thing well.
And if a student is on campus, and it’s the fourth week of class, and they haven’t found a friend yet, they’re going to have a lot on their mind that isn’t giving them the time and space to commit to their academic work. And all of those other statements that they respond to in the survey as well, whether there’s financial distress, or whether there’s accommodation concerns that haven’t been talked about yet, or whether there’s a feeling of I’m not belonging due to some identity group that I belong to, if we can help students work through and navigate those issues, then we free up their minds to concentrate on the thing that they’re here to do, which is to take classes, pursue a degree, graduate.
Ultimately, we want to get them to graduation, and so these retention flags, essentially, are really important for us to catch early. That’s why we do this survey four weeks in, so that they’re still time for students to kind of course correct in that first semester. We want to really make sure that students make it from the first semester to the second semester. That’s a big milestone of coming back in spring, and then of course, coming back for their sophomore second year. And I really believe that residence life plays a key role in helping understand where students are at in that retention journey.
Whether it’s having the conversation about finding friends and getting connected socially, or whether that opens up a conversation, to say, “Well, I said I hadn’t found a friend, but also I’m like, my family emergency at home just came up, and I am going back and forth, and I’m not even really here all that much,” and now we’re sort of unpacking the can of worms that shows that this student is in need of some serious support, and we can now link in some of our other support units on campus that are really well equipped to deal with whatever particular challenge the student is facing. So I think we’re often… When I say “We,” I mean our RAs most of the time, are most often some of the first people that get a sense of something going wrong with this student, and then we have so many arms out in so many different areas in campus, that we can connect students to, and that’s all in service of academic success, even if the particular issue in the moment isn’t purely academic. So I think we provide a lot of value in that way.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, well said, and very strongly agree. Because I think just in my background, working as a student support coach, yeah, the students… Because I think that’s even part of it, is like you were admitted for a reason. We thought that you were able to do this, and you can. But yeah, we want to remove as many points of friction and hurdles as possible, and maybe that’s academic-related or not. But yeah, I think the pitfall would be is if an institution was being overly or exclusively concerned with just grade performance, or something, it’s like there’s going to be so much more than that you’ve got to be able to pay attention to and have this kind of staff in place, and things, to be responsive to that.
So I think all good things of the pitfalls to avoid, and why all this work kind of matters, and everything. So we’ll wrap up though, as we always do, just give you the opportunity, if there is advice, and/or resources that you would want to share with listeners that are interested in learning more about this topic, or just things to leave folks with, as we conclude this episode.
Abby Groth:
Sure, yeah. I think it sounds a little like I’m speaking for the man here, but Roompact is really one of the best resources out there, in terms of learning more about residential curriculum and academic support in residence life. Whether it’s through the blog, or through all of the different resources that they’ve compiled together, they’re really one of the most organized resources out there, in terms of learning more about academic support in residence life, so I would certainly recommend Roompact’s website and academic support resources. Some of the in-person experiences that I’ve been part of through ACUHO-I have been really valuable for me. So they have a residence education, that’s newly named Residence Education Conference, in the fall. It used to be called the Academic Initiatives Conference. But that has been a really great conference I’ve attended several times now, at a good size, where it’s not one of these huge massive conferences where you just get lost in the crowd, it’s a couple hundred folks, and so you have the opportunity to actually talk with people.
And a lot of them are other people doing learning communities, or faculty in residence, or residential colleges, or student support, and so for someone like me, who I have a small team here, it’s nice to go out and learn a little bit more about what models are happening at other institutions, like we talked about earlier, “What works, what doesn’t work.” So that’s been a really valuable conference and a good use of professional development funds, in my experience. I’m also lucky to be plugged into the Big 10 Housing Officers Network. So there’s a living learning Communities subgroup in that network, which has been really wonderful to be part of the last few years. We have a rotating meeting in the fall, at different campuses, and that’s really nice to actually get to see other campuses.
Whether you’re part of a formal network or not, if you have a chance to tour another campus and see a physical space, sometimes that really is surprisingly insightful. And maybe, in a way, that doesn’t seem like it would be on the surface. You think like, “Okay, I just see another residence hall, whatever. It’s basically going to look the same as our residence halls.” But sometimes it’s as simple as like, “Yeah, we walked into the RA lounge or staff area, and I saw this sign on the wall that had a 10 Commandments of the RA, and that was really interesting, and I took a picture of it and then took it back,” or whatever. So sometimes it’s just the little things that you observe and pick up that spark some interesting ideas for me, at home. So I guess that’s a plug for if you get a chance to go on a field trip, or create a field trip for yourself, if you have another campus nearby, reach out and say, “Hey, it’s summertime, can I go over and just get a tour of your spaces? I’d love to see what they look like.”
Most people are open to that kind of thing. So those kind of informal networks, I think, are really, really helpful as well. I just learn so much from the people that I work with too, so probably more than any formal resource. I’m not reading academic journals on a daily basis, so I would be disingenuous to say, like, “Oh, go read this or that in-depth research.” I just learn a lot from the people that I talk to, so that’s my biggest piece of advice, I think.
Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. I mean, I think both formal and informal learning networks are crucial, because I think whether it’s that people can just literally teach you new things that you didn’t know before, normalize what you’re going through, or just help you problem solve, just answer more specific tactical questions, and things that you have. One way or another, you would, I think, be well-served by both groups, and it’s just more sometimes, where, “Okay, we got this intensive version of it during a conference,” or whatever else.
But I do like that idea of asking friends at other institutions for a tour, and stuff, because I love walking around campuses and seeing inside buildings. I’m just a curious guy. But I think, yeah, you can get inspiration from them, and offer to buy coffee, or something like that. But yeah, because I think just that acknowledgement of learning can happen anywhere and everywhere, so I think that is good advice to leave folks with. And just appreciate you, all that you’re doing for the blogging team and Roompact, and your kind words about all that we do, and just appreciate your time, sharing all that you did. So yeah, thanks for hanging out for the podcast.
Abby Groth:
Thank you so much for having me.
