In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Paul sits down with Sophia Muta to discuss ways to approach supervision to ensure staff members are taking care of themselves and growing as human beings, not just as employees. In her “side hustle” as a fitness instructor, Sophia has leveraged her experience to bring staff together and cultivate a more authentic and approachable supervision style. Come learn about ways you can incorporate practicality into your supervision style.
Guest: Sophia Muta (she/her/hers) self-identifies as a Midwest Princess after spending her entire life living and working in the Midwest. Sometime during her undergrad at Iowa State University, Sophia realized teaching in a traditional classroom was not her vibe, so she went on to earn her MA in Higher Education with a Concentration in Social Justice and Diversity from the University of Michigan. Today, Sophia is passionate about combining equitable, inclusive practices with supervision, education, and advocacy. Sophia spends her free time reading, crafting, teaching barre classes, and hanging out with her dog.
Host: Paul Gordon Brown
Background music via https://www.FesliyanStudios.com
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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:
Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat, the podcast where we talk to housing and residence life professionals about all sorts of good things in the field, best practices, what it means to be a professional here. And today I’m excited because we have another member of our blog cohort. We’ve been doing a series of these, and as you may know, we hire a blog cohort. They write with us for a year, so you can see a lot of their great written work, but we also like to get them on the podcast just to get to know them and maybe talk about something that they’re passionate about that can maybe spark that in others. So today I’m excited to have Sophia with us, who actually is a second generation blog cohort member following in the footsteps of Ashley who was a cohort mate for us last year. And I’m excited to have you on the podcast. How are you doing, Sophia?
Sophia Muta:
Doing good. Yeah, doing really good. Excited to be here.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’re a relatively new professional in the field. I think you’re ending year four of the full-time experience. Can you give folks maybe a little bit of your background and how you ended up where you were? How you’re a Midwest princess, as it says in your bio?
Sophia Muta:
Yes, I would love to. I would love to. So I started by going to my undergrad at Iowa State University, was focused on being a French education major. So teaching French as a high school teacher was my initial goal. And then my second year as a college student, I became an RA, and obviously things have changed a little bit. So I was an RA for about two years working with an honors specific floor, which I loved, had a lot of nerds on my floor. And then after that, the pandemic hit when I was in college, and working as an RA, doing student teaching, realized maybe being a teacher was not for me. But I knew I wanted to do grad school so I started applying to different programs, specifically focused on programs that offered a social justice lens because I was really passionate about social justice education.
And I landed at the University of Michigan, so keeping the Midwest vibes. And I focused my master’s program on higher ed with a concentration in social justice and diversity. While there, I had an internship that I worked off-campus housing. So I got to see the side of off-campus housing with the Dean of Students office with my background in housing as an RA. While there, I also started taking barre classes with some of my cohorts. So it was a fun Galentine’s Day experience, and that helped lead me into where I am now. But after I graduated from Michigan… My partner is a grad student here at UW Madison. So yeah, did a very specific search, thankfully got a nice interview with UW Madison Housing Program and was hired as a residence life coordinator in one of our tower buildings. And then transferred to a smaller community on the lake shore, so I have a beautiful view of the lake.
And then as I was going through this experience, trying to find work-life balance, I came back to those barre classes that I did as a student in Michigan, took some classes, got involved at the front desk for a free membership because I love saving money. That’s a big thing about me, I’m very financially focused. So started working as a front desk assistant part-time outside of my UW Madison job to get a free membership to take barre classes. And then six months later, I applied to be an instructor. So now I work full-time in housing, part-time as a fitness instructor doing barre classes, and then this lovely Roompact job as well. So that’s kind of me.
Paul Brown:
I feel like it’s a very Midwest trait to be mindful of money and saving and things like that.
Sophia Muta:
Life hacks too, right?
Paul Brown:
Yeah. You’re fulfilling the Midwest stereotype of practical mindedness and thinking things through. I think if you can cook a mean tater tot casserole, then you’ll have hit all the cliche boxes about living in the-
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, I’ll work on it. Snicker salad though, I can do.
Paul Brown:
Okay, good. I’m sure there’s 10 people in that department that can give you a recipe that’s been in their family forever. Well, that’s neat because we actually just had someone write about… We actually run two cohorts, so we have a professional grad audience focused one and then one that does on student staff. And one of our student staff cohort folks wrote about it’s okay to have a second summer job. Meaning if you’re a summer RA, and of course it’s a very different experience than when you’re doing it in the academic year, talking about how do you navigate that and things like that. And so you obviously juggle a couple jobs in academic life.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
Do you see that in your student staff, trying to navigate that? Have you helped them in any way? Because I think that’s something that… I think in my past experience in residence life, there was a prevailing attitude of this is your primary job, you shouldn’t have something else. And I think we’ve, as a field, come to appreciate that, yeah, but you know what, students have a range of financial situations and other things, and who are we to say this is the only thing that you can do if you can juggle it all. But have you encountered that with student staff quite a bit?
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, for sure. And actually I think I’ve encountered both end situations where students are considering a second job or they’re like, “I’m so overwhelmed, what can I give up?” So I’ve had conversations with students about navigating money. I love to talk about money, so I talk to them about high yield savings accounts, emergency funds, and then I also talk on the flip side of, “Okay, well, you are in college, you should be focusing on studying. Maybe this other job, it sounds really toxic, maybe you should not be doing that. Maybe we find something different to help you leave college more well-rounded. You can give that up and then still do something else.” Another thing that I’ve done actually the past couple years with students is during our student staff training, we have conference days, so a couple colleagues and I have created money presentations where we do a Money 101, Money 102 or 201.
So it’s again, trying to create some foundational money skills for students because money is taboo, we don’t really talk about money. We don’t want to talk about money, it’s scary. There’s a lot of shame around money as well. So trying to talk to students now I think is really important. We do emphasize a savings account, what is a high yield savings account? What is an emergency fund? Why does an emergency fund matter? How and when do you know you should pay off your loans? And then we also talk about credit cards and credit card debt, what credit card might be right for them. And different types of credit. There’s so many different types of credit, how to safely choose a credit card or a different loan as well as they’re exiting the field. And I will say, I am probably not the expert on credit cards. Paul, you probably know more about me.
Paul Brown:
I know how to get points and miles out of credit cards, let’s be clear.
Sophia Muta:
And still, a good thing for them to know about, these life paths around money, super important, that they’re not learning in the classroom. And oftentimes you have to do a lot of self-education if you don’t have someone teaching you, like a parent, a guardian or a mentor. So I think we try to set them up for success outside of college as well.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. When I was last working at an institution and we did a, “Okay, we’re going to completely redo training. Really completely blow it up and put it back together again.” And one of the things that we did was we added in a retreat at the beginning and we focused on skill-based stuff. So we weren’t talking about, here’s how you fill out an incident report. That came later. We focused on, how do you write professional emails? Could have been… That session on fiscal pieces could have very well fit in with what we were trying to do in that space. I think flipping it, the student staff gave us the feedback of, “Oh, I feel like this is…” It felt more like a leadership opportunity and not just, “Okay, let’s go through the procedure and policy stuff,” because we put the stuff front loaded at the beginning to tone set of, “All right, let’s use this as a space to also help you.” And I think that what you described encapsulates that.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, for sure.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. And you also, I know too, have leveraged your fitness experience job and things like that with your staff. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Because I know there’s a good story in there.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, so I work as a barre3 fitness instructor, so it’s a corporate corporation, and then each one is individually owned. So I work at the one here in Madison. Barre3 is focused on strength, cardio, and mindfulness. So we start by learning, as an instructor, just a signature class, so that combines everything. So you get the strength training, you get the mindfulness piece, you get a little cardio burst, all with the goal of working towards your best self. I think one of the things I love best about barre3 is we offer modifications for every single class and throughout every single class for each posture as well. So no matter what your day looks like, the way you show up is what is best for you, and we want you to honor your body every time you show up. I teach fitness classes weekly. And I started with a signature class and then started getting training in strength classes and cardio classes, and those lined up with the academic year while students were here.
For a part of our training, we have to host family and friend classes. So I would invite my student staff to attend one of my family and friends classes so that I can get the experience in training, but also so that they could see me in a different role and have a fun, hopefully fun experience seeing me be new at something. So I’ve offered the signature class over the summer, and then we had a strength class, and most recently, a cardio class. And I’ve had student staff from the current year that I was in, but then also student staff who just live in Madison, they came and joined the class because they just think it’s so fun. So it was a really cool bridging of my two jobs. I love the supervision piece, working in housing, but I also love being mindful of myself, my body, and then helping other people find a mind-body connection as well.
Paul Brown:
That’s awesome. I think what I love about that is, especially this generation, they can sniff out inauthenticity, no problem. And so the fact that you can wed the two and they can see you in a different, I was going to say format, that seems weird, but from a different life, from a different angle, “Oh, you’re a multi-pronged human being,” helps further that sense of authenticity, open up, “There’s someone I can connect to.” Do you think that’s helped in your supervision at all?
Sophia Muta:
Absolutely. I was going to say, I think when you come into a fitness space, fitness already, there’s a lot of barriers for people, different barriers, different reasons, but oftentimes it’s hard to get into a fitness space to feel comfortable with the people around you and knowing your own body. I think when I’ve invited student staff, they have their peers around them, so there’s a little bit of trust. They, in general, know who I am because I supervise them, we have a relationship. But I think what’s really unique about bringing them into a fitness class and teaching a fitness class to them is the level of trust that they give me. They trust me to make sure that they’re aligned, that they’re not going to hurt themselves, that they are building strength, that they are focusing on themselves. It’s part of that balance too.
Paul Brown:
I’m smirking because I’m thinking this is a very elaborate, trustful.
Sophia Muta:
It kind of is, in a different way. They really are putting so much trust in me as a supervisor and as a fitness instructor to let me guide them in something that is new and different, and they wouldn’t have this experience elsewhere. I think after the classes, there’s a lot of trust that was built, and they get to have so much fun too. There’s so much joy in moving, in being silly, and having a little ha-ha moment. And especially, I’m training, so these are classes that I’m maybe teaching for the first time, so they get to see me making mistakes. They get to see that human part of me and see me laugh it off and then get back into it, and, “It’s going to be okay,” even if there is a small mistake.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, that totally makes sense. Have you seen it show up at… Have you used stuff from that space in staff meetings or in one-on-one? Because they obviously went to your more formal environment, but I’m sure there’s some pieces that you pulled from that and use in your regular day-to-day supervision or spaces.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, for sure. So I think probably the main thing that I bring from barre3 into my supervision or different meeting spaces is the mindfulness piece and the balance piece and listening to your intuition. So mindfulness, we have different moments where we’re mindful of how we’re showing up in spaces. If something is going wrong in a staff meeting, they’re completely derailed, there’s no getting back, I usually just am like, “All right, we’re going to end things now.” And that’s okay. I think listening to your intuition or in a way listening to your body… I’ve had an experience where there was a staff meeting that there was not much content, but we still needed to meet so that we could have a discussion about an upcoming program, and instead of having it be a formal staff meeting, we all got dinner in the dining hall together and talked over there. Because everybody has to eat, right? So I think following my intuition in that sense.
And then for balance, because we want to be mindful holistically, every single one-on-one that I have with a staff member, I always ask them what they’re doing to take care of themselves. Oftentimes, they’re like, “Oh, that’s a good question, Sophia. Oh, I don’t know.”
Paul Brown:
It’s a really good phrasing, right? Not, “How are you?” “What are you doing about…”, that reframes the question in a different way, I think, than sometimes we ask it.
Sophia Muta:
Yes. And I think that reframe, the, “What are you doing?”, they have to respond with something, it can’t just be, “I’m good.” It’s really focusing on thinking about you as a human, your day-to-day, your week to week. “What are you doing?” And if it’s nothing, let’s talk about it because it’s important to take care of yourself in college. Yes, the academics are important. A lot of them really care about their grades and the LinkedIn networking and different job opportunities, and they’re not going to be able to keep that going without finding a balance, without being able to take care of themselves.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. I think that’s what… Sometimes when I think about… I have not supervised a student staff member in a very long time. There’s a part of me that wants to go back and do it just to see if I could still do it or if I could do it better. Just curious. Or maybe I’d fall completely flat on my face, I don’t know. But I think sometimes when I think about supervision, there’s certainly… And we’ve talked about this before, your first generation University of Wisconsin Madison blogger, Ashley, wrote a piece, and I’ll include this for the show notes for people, called… Oh, gosh, now I’m going to butcher the title, but it’s basically about it’s not okay to just be a chill supervisor, was more or less what it was talking about. And so the general gist of it was, being a chill supervisor, being like, “Oh, it’s okay,” or, “Hey, we’re just going to check in,” and maybe the equivalent on an RA floor is like, “I’m the cool guy, I’m the cool RA,” does a disservice to student staff members that you supervise.
And I think sometimes when we talk about, oh, do we attend to the, “How are you doing in your classes?” And things like that, if you were to just stop there, that’s kind of thinking more in the chill. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but you can reframe them. That’s what I liked about your language choice of what are you doing, which flips it a little bit and makes it more like an active engagement into checking in on their wellbeing and their mindfulness and their health and what they’re doing. Do you have other strategies like that that you do? I have a feeling you do, and I want to know what they are, as I put you on the spot to think about it and you’re like, “I don’t know, I just do that every day. It’s just who I am.”
Sophia Muta:
Strategies where I’m more intentional about…
Paul Brown:
Yeah, you’re really actively getting in there. My sense of view is that you have goals for your student staff and you want to try to reach them towards those goals. They’re going to have their own and you’re going to help them reach there, but you also have a set of goals of things that you’re looking out for for them, and that’s the non-chill part, even though you can do it in a chill way, I feel.
Sophia Muta:
For sure. Well, and yeah, I think the title you were looking for is chill is not a supervision style.
Paul Brown:
That’s it. There we go.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, yeah. And I am very grateful that Ashley is my direct supervisor now because I do learn a lot from her. I think where a lot of my intentionality comes from, and you let me know if this is answering your question, but I try to think about the why, and if the student staff is going to understand the why, and if they’re not going to understand it, how do we get there? So I think for me, in my staff meetings or even in trainings, one-on-ones, I want to make sure that they get all the details, all the nitty-gritty details that is going to help them to be successful.
And I think that’s where my intentionality comes from. Because this question of, “What are you doing to take care of yourselves?” I’m sure people are asking the, “How are you? What are you doing for self-care?” I think those are very common questions, but I think it’s the details that matter. And that’s where I think that I thrive as a supervisor, is being able to focus on the details to help students get through not just the job, but get through college and being able to be successful afterwards too.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah.
Sophia Muta:
Did I answer your question?
Paul Brown:
You don’t have to please me with the answer. No, I think that’s kind of what I want to hear. I feel like sometimes, and we’ve talked about this in the cohort, is I mentioned to the cohorts, the content that we have on our blog that seems to perform the least successfully, meaning doesn’t get a lot of views, doesn’t seem to spot engagement, is the self-care topic. And when I really dug into that, what is going on here, that I actually found it was the very generic reminders of, “Oh, create a schedule for yourself,” things that I think people have encountered in some way, shape, or form before and know they should do even if they don’t do. Everyone’s like, “That’s important, so that’s why we should focus on it and write about…” But that’s not what people seek out. What they’re seeking out, really, our self-care content that has done really well gives people really actionable practical pieces that are in context, not just, “Spread out your day and set aside at least an hour to do these things.”
I feel like that is, “I’ve heard that before. That’s not the first time I’ve heard that before. I know I should, but I still don’t do that.” But what does it look like on a Tuesday or when I’m meeting with a staff member. Or the mindset stuff, how do I get into that mindset?
Sophia Muta:
For sure, for sure. And I think there’s a lot of tools out there, and I do provide those, the calendars, the take management worksheets. I provide those to the student staff I supervise so they can always access them. But I think where the magic happens is when you’re able to talk to them one-on-one, asking them, “What are you doing to take care of yourselves?” And then referencing back to, “Hey, last week you told me this. Did you do this? Did you not do this? Last week you told me you had this exam on this day. What did you do afterwards to take care of yourself?” And I think that that also helps to build trust and care and a strong relationship because they know that you see them as a human being. You’re not just an employee, you are somebody that a supervisor cares about a lot.
Paul Brown:
Yeah. Maybe it’s then the helping them… You can provide them tools, worksheets, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, but it’s helping them make sense of it and contextualize it in their lives, but also in their day-to-day.
Sophia Muta:
Yeah.
Paul Brown:
I might be really great and mindful for a couple weeks, and then all these things happen, and suddenly I’m just not doing the things that I probably had been doing that are successful, and I need someone to be like, “Remember you haven’t been to the gym at all in the last week. What’s going on with that?” Like, “Oh, right. Thanks.”
Sophia Muta:
And definitely sometimes there are weeks where I’ll ask the question and they’re like, “You know what, Sophia, I’m not taking care of myself because I have this exam that I need to prep for.” And that’s okay. You can’t be focused on taking care of yourself all the time. Sometimes there’s something that you have to do that you have to do, and whether that means that you’re staying up late or you’re not going to the gym, that’s okay, as long as afterwards you have a plan to get back into it. And make sure that your academics aren’t your entire life, your entire experience. Super important. Somebody who has a master’s degree, I’ve been in there, but being a holistic human being, that’s where the real true importance is.
Paul Brown:
Yeah, for sure. Well, we’re getting a little bit towards time, so I wanted to ask you, what’s your favorite thing that you teach in those classes, those barre classes? What is the thing where you’re like, “Oh, I love it when I get to do this?”
Sophia Muta:
Yeah, I think probably my favorite is… So I love teaching cardio classes. I was most recently trained to teach cardio classes. Cardio’s hard, and when I say cardio, people are like, “Ugh, ew.” And I get it, I used to be the same way. Or they think cardio is running.
Paul Brown:
That’s what I was going to say.
Sophia Muta:
Some people love running, and it is a beautiful outlet for them, and other people, they’re like, “Running is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” Thinking about the mile run or the pacer test in high school.
Paul Brown:
I have some trauma around that, so I know that very well.
Sophia Muta:
For sure, for sure. I think for me, I love teaching cardio because I always start the class by saying, “We are going to have fun. We’re going to get sweaty. Your heart rate’s going to get up there, but we’re going to have fun.” And cardio is also about being mindful. Something really important in our cardio classes is you have to pay attention to your exertion rate because we don’t want to push you into a zone that’s unhealthy. So I always preface, you have to pay attention to your body. You have to pay attention to your exertion rate throughout class. You can know when you need to push yourself, but also when you need to pull yourself back. I think that’s a super important framework. I also really love the moment where we’re at the end of our third circuit. We teach three circuits, and people are tired.
They are red, sweaty. They have been doing this cardio for the past 20-ish minutes. It’s that final big push where we’re just having fun. And sometimes I’m like, “It’s okay to smile. We got 30 seconds left. We’re moving with community. It’s feeling good. You’re almost done. And then we have a reset coming up. We’ll calm your body down.” So I think that moment where people are… You can tell they are tired, they do not want to be there, they do not want to push themselves, but because of the energy in the room and the community around you, that’s where it can give you a little bit more energy to find that final push. So yeah. Yeah.
Paul Brown:
That’s great. I love it. I love it. I’m probably not signing up for one of your classes, but-
Sophia Muta:
That’s okay.
Paul Brown:
That’s a me thing, that’s not on you. It’s because I hate being hot and sweaty. So I’m like, “If I can figure out a way to work out and not get super hot and sweaty, I’ll solve a lot of things probably. I’ll get very rich probably.”
Sophia Muta:
For sure. For sure.
Paul Brown:
Well, thanks for joining us. Such a fun topic. I’m really glad we got to talk about it a little bit, and thanks for being in the blog cohort. I’ll include a link in our show notes of… It goes to all your posts in case people want to dig into your content and things like that. But thanks for joining us. And for our listeners, we’ll see you next time on Roompact’s ResEdChat. Bye, everyone.
