In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, join Noah and Frankie as they talk about programming. Whether you love it or hate it, programming is a huge part of Residence Life and often the main place that we work to build community for and with our students. How do we work to make these programs effective? How do we get student buy in to them? What is the RAs role in effective programming? On this episode, we will seek to answer these questions, tell stories, and provide tangible advice to Residence Life Staff.
Guest: Frankie DeLisle (she/her/hers), Property Manager, Greek Village, University of South Carolina
Host: Noah Montague
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:
Noah Montague:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. So my name is Noah Montague and I use he/him/his pronouns, and today, I am going to be your host. If you’ve been listening to my episodes, watching my episodes, spending any kind of time with me on here or in any other places, you know that I like to say that I am a storyteller at heart, and the stories that I choose to tell work to center the college student experience and the college professional experience in a lot of different ways, which makes me all the more excited about today’s topic.
So with that today, we’re going to be talking about another key part of the residential experience, and for many of us, a pretty big part of our jobs in programming. So programming can be a main way that we build that community, or it can be something that we just have to do as a part of our jobs. And there are a lot of varieties in there as well. We might try and try and try to get students to come, or we might have events that blow our own expectations out of the water.
But how do we even make these effective? How do we get students to buy in? What is the RA’s role in these programs? Those are some of the questions that we’re going to be talking about today, which makes me super thrilled to allow our guests today to introduce themselves to us.
Frankie DeLisle:
Hi, nice to see you. I’m Frankie DeLisle. I use she/her/her pronouns, and I currently am a property manager for the Greek Village over at the University of South Carolina. Yeah.
Noah Montague:
Awesome. Frankie, I’m super excited to have y’all here. But getting into today then, I’d love to hear a little bit about what your experience with programming for residential students has looked like.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, I feel like I’ve had a very vast experience within programming. So I was an RA in college and then I’ve also been a full-time staff member in a residential hall at a larger SEC institution. And then I still work at an SEC institution now, and the difference between that programming has been really interesting.
So as an RA, I was really in it. I was planning my hall events, I was planning my floor events, those types of things. Versus when I moved to that professional space at the institution I worked at, I as the professional was still doing majority of the planning. That’s just how our curriculum had went.
And before I left there, I did some pre-planning for the next year to have programs up and ready, but I still wanted to include my RAs to get that buy-in. A lot of my RAs were interested in it. Versus now my job description says I can do programming, but I don’t get asked to do any real residential programming for my residents.
So it’s really interesting in the differences of what I’ve been asked in my professional career comparatively to then. But it’s been a lot of, I do most of the programming, which has been fun for me because I really like doing it, but definitely different just to see what that looks like from being a student and whatnot.
I think that’s really interesting how different institutions do it. I know you just got a new job too-
Noah Montague:
I did.
Frankie DeLisle:
… within your institution, but at your school, do your RAs do most of that programming-
Noah Montague:
Yeah.
Frankie DeLisle:
… or what’s that look like?
Noah Montague:
No, no, no. It’s a great question. I think that for me, I’ve also had, same as you, the variety of experience in who is majority responsible for the programming.
When I was an RA, the RAs were almost entirely responsible for the programming. And I remember being an RA and my hall director wanted to do an event, and we thought that that was odd that he wanted to run an event himself, my entire staff, because that just wasn’t our norm. The RAs are the ones who did the events is how that role worked previously.
In my current role, and thank you for the shout-out on the new position again, it’s very exciting. I would say it’s about 50/50. I think that it depends on what the program is.
So our residential curriculum for my institution, RAs are expected to do a monthly corridor program type of thing, but the corridor programs are interesting in that we also don’t tell anyone they can’t come. So it ends up being a program for everyone labeled as a corridor event. And then the all hall events, typically for our living learning communities or for our student created communities or even for some of our programming requirements within our curriculum, those I typically host. That differs from supervisor to supervisor in that we’re fairly fluid in who is supposed to be doing the programming.
My institution, it’s more they need to happen and they need to happen effectively and they need to have students engaged in them. But like you, I’ve had a lot of different versions of it. And with this new job, this might be the first job I’ve ever had that actually has specifically, “This is a program you, Noah, are responsible for and you alone are responsible for this program.”
I actually think this is the first job in my career that I have had that. Because it’s always been collaborate and this person can do it and you can delegate. But now it’s, “Noah, you are running this event and its success is solely you.” And that’s an interesting change as well, I would say. But yeah, I’ve had a little bit of all of it in my experience.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah. I also, within my experience, it’s been interesting for me to go through this because I didn’t have any reference when I became an RA because I started college during COVID, and so I became an RA later in my college career. And at that point in time, previous RAs weren’t doing programming because they logistically couldn’t with distance and everything. But yeah, it’s just been interesting. And also just seeing how that dynamic changes.
Noah Montague:
Definitely.
Frankie DeLisle:
So at my previous institution, we did all hall events, but also we had neighborhoods where I worked, so it’d be four buildings within one area. And basically it was a neighborhood because we all reported to the same supervisor. But have you done programming between, I’ll say buildings, in a general…
Noah Montague:
So that, funnily enough, the language of neighborhood, we just adapted that and the new position that I got is running one of those neighborhoods. And the new program that I have to run is our neighborhood program for my area. So that’s very funny that that example is exactly what I’m now doing.
But previously to now, as a resident director, I ran four different residence halls. They were smaller, but I did run four residence halls as a hall director. And anytime I did any kind of program for all of my students, it became something for everyone.
I do also have the privilege of at my university, I’ve been able to plan and coordinate several conference trips across the entire department, across the entire division in some capacity. So yeah, I have done a lot of that multi-building type of programming. I think that it was part of why I got this job to begin with was that experience of multi-building programming.
But for me, it comes down to that question of buy-in that we’ve already talked about, especially with, okay, this is this building, this building and this building that we have kind of told them they’re all themed for this neighborhood. We’ve told them they’re connected, but do they feel it? So how do we get them to buy in to that?
Which I think is my next question for you then as well is how do we get this buy-in from students to participate? Because we’re planning these events in some places because we have to, in some places because we want to, and in some places both, but then we need them to come. So how do you work to get buy-in?
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, honestly, I think across the institutions I’ve worked at, the buy-in has always been if there’s food at the event. And I feel like that across my friends who are also in higher education in similar positions, that’s kind of been what I hear from them too. And I think that’s interesting because me as an educator, I want the actual aspects of the event to be fun.
So whether it’s learning about something or doing an activity or something like that, that’s great. But the reality is majority of my population would come get the food and leave. And that’s also what we spent most of the budget on.
So at my previous institution, I think we spent $1000 on Cane’s for, it was an International Women’s Day event and we got Cane’s, I think it was, and then they bought little those, they’re like the tiny flower vases, I can’t think of what they’re actually called now, and fake flowers and stuff. And they did that and that was a really popular event. But at the end of it, I went, “Okay, what was the educational aspect of it?” And I think that’s where I-
Noah Montague:
What did they get out of this besides food?
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah. And that’s what I look to it a lot, and something I still am trying to find within my roles because I do love programming. That’s one of the best parts I think of being in higher education. We get to do a lot of fun stuff, but how can I get that buy-in without necessarily providing food? But also that’s such a big thing too, is I could be providing food to students who maybe they’re lower on their meal plan, things like that, and there’s so much to go into it. But is that something you see too, food’s the big buy-in?
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I definitely see food as something that brings students out to events. I have had the very unique challenge of I ran a leadership living learning community for students, so they had an interesting buy-in built in because they had to apply to get into it. So there was some of that. All of my residential essential students chose to be there.
So that was an interesting part, which then became my task of how do I get them to care about this thing, this amorphous thing that is student leadership development, how do I get them to care about it? And food did help in getting them to things. I think that there is no way around that. Students are going to come for free food. I would come to something for free food.
And I think that that second part of my sentence in that I would come for it, I ask myself, I ask my RAs, I ask students, I’m like, “Hey, if we did this, would you go?” And even just including them in that process I’ve seen be really helpful of talking to them rather than doing what I think they want because I just turned 29. I don’t know what an 18-year-old wants to do anymore, and I don’t want them to do some of the things that they want to go do. I want to have it be engaging and think about ways to make something engaging.
But I’ve also seen the inverse as well. Recently, I did a pizza party for one of my living and learning communities because I believed, to the point that you’re making, if I’m going to get buy-in for an event, if I’m going to get this community to go to something, I have to have food and the only thing I’m going to have is food. It’s just a pizza party. It’s going to be a chill little event. And that’s what they’re going to want is that. They’re going to come, they’ll eat, maybe they’ll talk and they’ll leave is what I expected.
And then they brought out a karaoke machine and did karaoke for three hours. And it made me rethink a lot of things because that was challenging my perspective of what they were going to want to do, thinking about, okay, this is… Because we are now seeing our 18-year-olds, our students who COVID hit in seventh grade, it’s either sixth or seventh grade now.
So much of their time, to your own point, was online, and they didn’t get to build community. So then it begs the question for me of, because I threw a pizza party and then they brought out an activity, I’m like, “Oh, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s changing. Maybe they do want something different.” Do you know what I mean? I’ve been seeing both lately.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah. I feel like when I was actively in the halls doing that kind of thing, I feel like that was something I had to decide on what my perspective on it was. Was my perspective that they actually learned something or was my perspective that they came out and did something to determine the success of the event? And within that, and I don’t know what the composition’s necessarily like at your school, but I feel like there’s more and more single rooms becoming available so students aren’t having roommates. I feel like, at least for me, I fully believe in the bandwidth of you should have a roommate your first year of college, which-
Noah Montague:
I’m very pro roommate, for sure.
Frankie DeLisle:
Some people aren’t meant for that life. I openly admit having a roommate in college was a very, very hard time for me because I’m essentially an only child. My siblings are 13 plus years older than me. I’ve never had to share a day in my life.
And going into that, especially, I think my residence hall room was maybe 13 by 10 or something like that. Going into that space and then just being able to find people outside of that, again, during COVID, COVID happened my senior year of high school and then going into it. I think that was also different too because a lot of my friends put off going to college for a year in the hopes that COVID would die down.
But going back to the programming and buy-in suggestion too, I would love to hear your opinion on how do we… Food’s great for the buy-in, but how do we still acknowledge the people who have dietary restrictions and maybe can’t partake in those? So still having an activity.
Backstory in that, I have celiac disease. I could not eat a singular thing at any of my events that I hosted this past year. And before I left, I knew I hired an RA with celiac disease, and that was something that I had planned to implement on my staff, “You have to have a gluten-free environment.”
Noah Montague:
Yep.
Frankie DeLisle:
That was something my RD did when I was in college too, so I’ve seen it done. But to that point we talked earlier, that’s a little bit more expensive.
Noah Montague:
For sure.
Frankie DeLisle:
So what are we doing more with less type situation, which I think is a later question you had for me.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, but we can get into it now too, because it’s important to think about in this reality of higher education being a lot of spaces being we are being asked to do more with less in a lot of different ways. That is with our time, that is with our budgets, that is with our programming. And I’m noticing with your question as well, it’s so important because I don’t know that it’s something that all live-in staff are thinking about or being told they have to think about.
I have a dairy allergy, I’m a vegetarian, so I think about these things in my daily life, which then means that my RAs are being asked to think about it in their programming. What are we having so that every student can participate if we are doing food? And my RAs recently, we do a weekly hall social for my community that they plan, they implement, they decide what we’re doing, and they do a dip o’clock. So it’s a weekly different dip that they wanted to do. And I was like, “Okay, cool. Sure, that’s fun.”
And then 60 people came to this event to have cheese dip and crackers, but they also got pretzel bites for in case someone couldn’t have dairy, and then they got carrots and celery and other things in case someone couldn’t have gluten or corn for the chips. And my staff all thought about it and we remained under budget. So I think that it is…
I feel like for me, and to your own point, yes, because I am buying vegan food a lot of the time, it is significantly more expensive than the other option. And I think about that a lot with my own buying. And I watched them stay under budget and have an option for all kinds of different students with different dietary restrictions to participate as they wanted to and remain under budget. So I think that for me, it’s more about are we having these conversations and are departments and individuals and hall directors viewing it as a priority, and what does it say if we’re not viewing it as a priority?
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, I totally agree with you in that sense. Because I’ll be for real, I think the only reason I even really considered it was because my RD said we had two, and that was because someone on our staff, I can’t remember if it was just an allergy, but she couldn’t eat gluten, which I think is a really funny precursor to the fact that after I met her about two months later, I then got told I couldn’t eat gluten, but that’s a separate thing. But I fully believe I never would’ve though or maybe prioritized that had I not gotten that idea.
Noah Montague:
Had you not been told to prioritize it.
Frankie DeLisle:
And I think that’s just so interesting because that shows up in students and professionals’ everyday lives, like you mentioned, getting your own food. I also think dip o’clock’s a wonderful idea. I’m going to keep that in the back of mind-
Noah Montague:
Truly, I-
Frankie DeLisle:
… if I do a program again, that’s wonderful.
Noah Montague:
And talk about effective programming. That isn’t an event I thought would be successful, and then 60 students showed up.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, I-
Noah Montague:
I was like, okay, this is why we have RAs involved in programming to begin with is their ideas.
Frankie DeLisle:
That reminds me, and in that same vein of our general topic, makes me think of RAs, I personally feel RAs need to be involved in the programming because that’s where the ideas come from. Like you mentioned, we’re getting older, which I’m going to have a whole thing about on Sunday. But-
Noah Montague:
I think about it often.
Frankie DeLisle:
… I’m about to turn 25.
Noah Montague:
Happy almost birthday.
Frankie DeLisle:
Thank you. I’m about to be 25, so I’m only four, yeah, that sounds right, four-ish years older than the residents who are in my facility right now. They’re all around 19, 20, almost five years. Okay.
Noah Montague:
I officially have 10 to 11 years on my students, which is bizarre.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, which I still get asked if I’m a freshman sometimes when I go places. So that’s really great.
Noah Montague:
I’m like, “Thank you so much.”
Frankie DeLisle:
But they’re who knows what’s cool and funny and will get people. When I was in college, I wasn’t on the team that did it, but a group of RAs did an anything but a bowl event. So they bought cereal, they bought regular whole milk, and then I think they got oat milk or something that wasn’t a nut milk, so nut allergies.
But they did that, and that was the only cost they had because everybody else brought their own bowl of sorts. So one of my friends who was on a different floor, he brought, I think it was a cracker container, an empty plastic cracker thing, that he then put his cornflakes or whatever was bought at the time, the milk and he just was there with a spoon, eating it. And some of our residents brought… Some of them put bags in their shoes and did that, and that’s real great for them. But personally-
Noah Montague:
To each their own.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah. But those things, honestly, when I was 22 at the time, I definitely wouldn’t have thought of it, but I also feel like I get all my ideas from Pinterest and then can go from there. Or I just got advertised these little planter bowls on Amazon so you can make dirt cups. And I was like, “This would’ve been so great for the program that I had planned for the first…” … my old institution because then it would’ve brought in food because it was going to be a planting good habits situation.
But I’m not a cool kid anymore, unfortunately. I don’t know the things. I see all the fun stuff on TikTok and just go from there. But I think that’s what we need, because the RAs are posting their events or even I’ll laugh so much and get ideas from the content you post, even though it’s like you’re telling Res Life stories and that kind of thing, and it’s not programming centered. There are just so many funny things that come from that and lead to other connections.
Because I don’t know if you remember, but you were a connection between me and my RD. My RD watched you on TikTok, and I was like, “His name’s Noah. He’s so funny, whatever. Oh my God, I know who you’re talking about.” And it actually was the Parker TikToks, but…
Noah Montague:
That’s funny. No, that’s funny. But I think that goes back to this whole concept of programming in and of itself, because the point of it is community. It is connecting people, and that being… Because the question that we’re talking about right now is where the RA comes in to this space. What does that look like? What is the role of the RA? And helping to build that community with their peers because they know what their peers want, because they are, they’re there.
And for me, making sure that the RAs have buy-in, because if they don’t care about the event, students are not coming to that event at all because they’ll know, because one, the RA won’t advertise it, to… And I’m sure you’ve been to an event somewhere in your life where the person hosting it very clearly didn’t want to be there, and that matters to a person at that event, that intrinsic want to be somewhere, that community aspect matters to our students.
Frankie DeLisle:
I would love to know your opinion on, so what do you think getting the buy-in from… Well, actually, I should ask first, do you guys have hall councils or-
Noah Montague:
We do.
Frankie DeLisle:
… things of that nature?
Noah Montague:
Mm-hmm.
Frankie DeLisle:
So do they plan events too?
Noah Montague:
Yeah, so our hall council, we call them community leadership teams at my institution, they plan typically a monthly event they will organize. They get help and advice from myself, from RAs. I have RA liaison advisors with them as well. But yeah, no, they plan regular events for the community.
Frankie DeLisle:
What do you think the difference in getting that buy-in from a group like that who they’re volunteering their time to be on this hall council community leadership team? And granted, a lot of those people probably want to be RAs in the future, at least that’s kind of how it went with all of my hall councils. But versus an RA who it’s probably part of their job description in some sort of way, they’re adjacently getting compensated, whether that’s room and board or… So that’s a whole different thing.
Noah Montague:
So many different ways to pay them.
Frankie DeLisle:
But that kind of difference of I feel RAs want to be here, but that difference job description versus fun. I know my hall council that I had most recently advised, I really didn’t step in unless it was something they absolutely could not buy. And that conversation went, “We should get an Elvis impersonator.” “Well, as long as you pay the Elvis impersonator, yeah, that’s fine.” “We should buy plants.” Unfortunately, you cannot buy plants with university money.
Noah Montague:
But we can hire the Elvis impersonator.
Frankie DeLisle:
You can buy seeds. You can’t buy real plants.
Noah Montague:
That is so funny.
Frankie DeLisle:
But yes, you can get the.
Noah Montague:
The restrictions on purchasing is always entertaining because it’s like, “What do you mean I can hire a DJ, but I can’t buy a gift card? What do you mean by that?” It’s very comical at times.
But I think with your question, our hall council definitely has more buy-in into programming and that they are choosing to engage because either they want to do programming themselves, they want to be RAs, they might’ve been on their… I forget what it’s called, but their high school council, they might have been on that as well. I’ve been seeing that a lot.
And it might just be they want to have access to money. I think there are a lot of different reasons that we’ve seen students join a hall council at my institution. We also have hall council students are who get invited to leadership conferences that the university will pay for. So that I’ve seen be a sell for students as well.
But I think it goes back to the question of what are they getting out of it? What are they either going to learn, what are they going to gain, what are they going to eat at the event that there are a lot of different things? But the shift for me I think is, well, why should I go rather than, well, what is it? And I think that that has been an interesting shift in buy-in for programming.
But I think then, Frankie, my last question for you today, to just get us back into everything and summarize what we’ve chatted about, what advice would you give to a new residence life professional, a new professional responsible for programming? What advice would you give somebody who wants to put on more effective programming, wants to get buy-in, wants to include their RAs in everything? What’s one piece of advice you might give?
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that as we’ve been talking, and I think ultimately, just thinking back to conversations I’ve had with other professionals too, I think it really is just listening to the students. Now, I feel all the RAs that I’ve hired and have had the pleasure of working with have wanted to do that type of thing. So I think first you got to obviously build the rapport to get them to want to talk to you.
But once you have that, really listening to them because they’re going to figure out how to do it, and they’re also really going to figure out how to pivot when it comes to the money situations and those types of things. Where I was an RA, budget didn’t exist. We could ask for an amount, and we would see if it would get approved or not.
Noah Montague:
That was me as an RA as well. We didn’t have a, “This is how much you have,” and now we have that.
Frankie DeLisle:
Yeah. Versus my RAs that I was their supervisor, they knew how much they had for monthly events. And it was almost $1000 versus UW Platteville where I went to school is a technical mid-size institution that I personally believe is small versus I worked at Mizzou, which is SEC, 40 plus thousand students type situation. So I think getting that, because they automatically are doing more with less because they’re college students.
So you just have to listen to their ideas and really be open to it. And really, if you can, say no only when you legitimately cannot do it. Let them get the Elvis impersonator if your institution allows it. And you will find out after that gentleman leaves if it was effective or not. But those types of things, just listening in, I think would be my biggest advice to those professionals because you’re coming in excited with ideas, but who knows if the youth want to do that nowadays.
Noah Montague:
And they might. And I think that that might be the biggest piece of advice I would give as well. Not to just copy you at the end of this, but to the point that I made earlier, I put on a pizza party thinking that would be all they wanted and then they wanted more. And had I talked to them ahead of time, I might have planned it myself or thought about that myself.
And I think that for that living learning community, I was led to believe by another human that they wouldn’t want it and it was a whole different conversation. But I think that listening to our students prioritizing the ideas RAs are having because they know differently than we do. I did not think dip o’clock would be a success and then it was.
So I think that to your point, listening, working with them when we are the ones planning things, including them in the conversation so that they can be like, “What if we tried this? What if we did it this way? Actually, Noah, I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it. Not because you’re old, but also because we’re living it. We know differently.”
And I think that if we’re not including them in the conversations, then what are we actually doing? Who are we doing it for becomes my question.
Frankie DeLisle:
Absolutely.
Noah Montague:
But yeah. Well, that wraps up our time together today, Frankie, just about. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had a good time.
Frankie DeLisle:
Wonderful. I’ve been so excited waiting for us to get it scheduled.
Noah Montague:
I’m happy to hear that. And thank you all for joining us on today’s episode of ResEdChat. If you have an idea for a topic or a guest that you would like us to have on the show, please let us know by reaching out to Roompact. But for now, keep taking care of each other, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.
