This might be a controversial hot take, but I’m grateful for how the pandemic impacted my career trajectory – let me explain. Throughout my career, I’ve worked in both bifurcated and non-bifurcated Housing and Residence Life departments, and my four years of working as a Residence Director were split by Covid – I have two years of RD experience pre-pandemic, and two post-pandemic. As a Residence Director, pre-pandemic, I had enough of an understanding of Housing Operations to do my job, but I didn’t really care how Housing and Residence Life truly worked together – I saw our operations as integral and connected, but very much dismissed concerns thinking, “that’s a housing problem,” or if a student came to me with an assignments problem or concern I couldn’t solve directly, I’d respectfully – and gladly – tell them they needed to go to the central housing office. Covid changed this mindset because things I had put off learning how to do or learning how to understand – making assignment bookings in StarRez, billing, and dealing with 20-40 student moves daily due to quarantine and isolation – couldn’t be ignored any longer. As I’ve moved into leadership positions, I’ve learned that to stay in Residence Life means to also care about the operations side of the house. I connected with some of my former colleagues in Housing Operations over the last few weeks – below are some key things my Housing colleagues shared that they wish Residence Life professionals would understand with tips for how to be better partners:
Housing Operations professionals operate on the same timeline you do, and their own process calendar – care enough to know when they are busy. While the work looks different, Housing professionals are busy at the same times as Residence Life professionals – opening, closing, the first few weeks of a new term due to room swaps and changes – and they are also busy at times you wouldn’t expect. When Residence Life professionals are busy with training in August, the mental health uptick that typically comes mid-term, or they are swamped with student staff hiring, Housing Operations professionals are dealing with their own cadence, and likely handling one of the following – summer to fall transitions with conference and events, room swap and change periods, prepping for the housing application to open, or slating students into assignments, then releasing that information for the upcoming term. I’ve noticed that while Housing Operations professionals are usually very aware of the yearly trends that Residence Life professionals experience, and that isn’t always reciprocated. If you want to be a better partner to your Housing Ops friends, take the time to learn their yearly cadence, and be mindful of what you’re asking of them and when. Better yet, if you do need their assistance, batch your questions and concerns in one email, one phone call, or ask in a department meeting so that their inboxes are freed up a bit.
Understand that universities are businesses and Housing generates revenue. I’ll be the first person to admit that I hate thinking about colleges as businesses, and I get squeamish thinking about my department as the second highest revenue grossing entity at the university. But those are facts. As Residence Life professionals who care about student development we spend a lot of our time outside of this mindset, worrying about the student experience, student well-being, and how a student is growing and learning. But, in today’s landscape when students and their supporters are spending exorbitant amounts of money to go to college, and the value of a college education is heavily debated, you have to remember that colleges are businesses, and full beds equals revenue. So, while some occupancy decisions may not make sense to you, Housing Ops professionals are usually trying to ensure a university is in the black to help keep the lights on. Some – if not most – decisions are about money. It’s best to accept this, and make the best of what that means for you and the department you work in.
As such, here are some things that have helped me stay revenue-minded:
- Use your residence life budget wisely. The most expensive event doesn’t always translate to the most effective, and are the programs being put on contributing to retaining and enhancing the student experience? Is this program contributing to a sense of university, community, or building affinity? Sometimes the simplest (and least expensive) programs are the most effective.
- If a decision you make is going to retain a student at the university or make a student’s experience better, do that. I’m not saying that you should abandon your professional ethics, or compromise how you make decisions, but if a student can safely stay at your university without impacting the greater community, the aim should be to keep them there. And, sometimes having multiple roommate mediation meetings all to result in moving a student anyway, isn’t worth your time, or the frustration for a student.
- Admissions and retention are everyone’s responsibility. As an RD I used to get frustrated when I would have to work additional hours (usually on the weekend) outside of on-call duty and programming to assist with residence hall tours, or presentations to prospective families. I would also often forget that Housing Ops professionals would field concerns from these populations well before they were ever formally enrolled. Now, I see these commitments as integral to being in my role and helping run our department – universities don’t run without students, and those working in Housing and Residence Life are usually the best professionals to sell that experience.
Don’t make your Housing Ops colleagues be the bearers of unwelcome news. Depending on how your HRL office does occupancy and billing, housing assignments are not always created equal – a studio apartment in a newer building is likely to cost more than a triple in traditional-style housing. As a hall director, if you’re working through a room change with a student and you’re moving them to a different room type, work with your Housing Ops folks to know if that student is going to experience a difference in the billing on their student account. If the space you are moving them to is going to cost more, communicate that to the student ahead of moving them so they’re not finding this news out when they see a difference on their student account and they call the central housing office for more information. The former is just one example, but if you know something that Housing Operations is going to have to explain and your answer is going to be the same as theirs, do your colleagues a favor, and save the student from being bounced around from colleague to colleague.
Treat temporary and emergency spaces as such and stop giving them out at the slightest inconvenience. As residence life professionals we don’t want to keep students in unsafe situations, but students have also become very savvy at knowing what to say and how to say it to get themselves secured into a temporary space for a night or even a few days. However, temporary spaces are limited, and even the most gifted Housing Operations professionals can’t make empty spaces appear out of thin air – once they’re gone, they’re gone. Most of my colleagues have shared that they wish temporary spaces weren’t viewed as the magical solution that they’ve become and that they wish residence life professionals were a little more discerning about what warrants such a space. It appears that emergency spaces used to be reserved for Title IX incidents, major facilities concerns like floods, or physical threats, and now they get handed out if someone’s roommate glances at them the wrong way. As a residence lifer, if you put a student in an emergency space, you should be working with Housing Ops folks to get that student back in their original space or a new permanent assignment the next day (or as quickly as possible) in order to open that space up for other emergencies, and the student should understand that the space is only provided to them until the concern is resolved.
Have a basic understanding of your Housing Operations software and how it works. Unless you’ve had a reason to understand how your housing assignments software works in terms of billing, occupancy, and communication, it’s likely that you know how it works enough to do your own job. If you just have a rudimentary understanding of it and you’re looking for some professional skill-building, take some time to learn more than you need to know for your own job. Most Housing Ops professionals I know would love to sit down with a Residence Life professional and show them tips and tricks for how to use software they use every day, and knowing those shortcuts ultimately helps you. People are flattered when you ask them to show you something that they are an expert in – use this as an opportunity to learn more than what you need to know for your job and use it as a foundation to get to know your colleagues on a deeper level.
Whether you work in a bifurcated department or not, housing operations is a part of residential education, and vice versa – there’s a reason both names are typically in department titles.
