ResEdChat Ep 35: Crystal Cyr and Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding on their Multi-Institutional Study On The RA Role and Experience

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat, where we talk with cool people about cool things related to college housing and residence life. And I’ve definitely got two cool people with me today, and we’re definitely going to be talking about cool stuff. So let me tell you a little bit about where this episode began. So I attended the most recent NASPA convention. And I was looking through the program book and there was one program that really stood out to me, and it was about the RA role, and specifically research done into the RA role. What does that look like? What do we know about it? How should it look in the future? What might that be? And there’s a lot of folks that are asking questions about the RA role. Is it still relevant? How should you structure that? Is it too much for a staff member?
And so I had the luck of attending Kim and Crystal’s presentation here and I said, “You need to get on a podcast because we need to get your study and your information out there.” And so that’s really where this episode kind of began. So let’s start off by just having you do some introductions, so we know who you are and we’ll jump into the topic. So Kim, you want to start us off and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us, we really appreciate it. I’m Kim Kruchen-Spaulding. I currently work at the University of Colorado Boulder. I work in the strategic resources and support area, which actually is run by our COO, our chief operating officer. So it includes things outside of both academics and student affairs. So at a campus level, I help make sure and implement strategic initiatives. So that could include things like compensation plans, lots of different and interesting things. So previously, I had the wonderful opportunity to sit and support our assessment office, which Crystal now leads. So I’ll let her introduce herself too.

Crystal Cyr:
Yeah. Thanks, Kim. Thanks, Paul, for having us. My name’s Crystal Cyr. Pronouns are she/hers. And I am also at University of Colorado Boulder. I’m the director for student affairs planning, assessment and data analytics. So we support all of student affairs. That does include Res Life and assessing how things are going, how effective are their program services, operations, facilities, all of those things. And this RA study was a big project that we started, actually, a couple of years ago now when Kim was also still in the office and I was the lowly assessment specialist. We had a great time with our project and it was a lot of fun coming into it, so we’re excited to talk about it today.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s awesome. And what I love about it too is it’s not just an internal study, it’s a multi-institutional study. And I don’t think I have seen that, really, anywhere so far. So it’s pretty groundbreaking in that regard, pretty hot, great dissertation topic, things like that. Maybe to start us off, tell us a little bit about how did this come about? What led you to start researching this? You gave us a little bit of hints, but what started you down this path?

Crystal Cyr:
Yeah, great question. I’ll jump… Kim, feel free to jump in. So this really started with the year before COVID started, so it stretches back a few years, we kind of started hearing some murmurings through Res Life and Res Life leadership came up and they were like, “The RAs are talking about some challenges they’re experiencing. They’re using words like burnout. They want more support. They think they need more resources. We don’t know if this is just a couple of the squeaky wheels or if this is a true thing that we need to a address in our department.” And so that led us to using just an internal survey to start with. And we crafted this survey to get to some of those questions. What were those stressors? What motivated you to become an RA? If you’re in your second year, why are you still here? What keeps you here? What are your relationships like with your residents, with your hall director? All of these other questions.
We used a burnout inventory to actually measure their level of burnout. And we came back and presented the data and we were like, “It’s true. It’s everybody. So there are concerns.” And then it was a, well, by the time we got this study out for internally, COVID had hit, so it was a well, but is it a result of COVID or is it the position itself? Valid questions. So that was one question.
And the second one was, and are we unique? Is this just a CU Boulder thing, or are there other schools that are experiencing something similar? We’re like, “Well, we don’t know. Let’s find out because there isn’t anything out there benchmarking the RA experience.” So that’s what led us to look into the Pac-12 Conference and reach out to other schools to say, “Hey, we want to know what the experience is like for RAs and do some comparison, see if we’re the only ones out here.” And a lot of them had the same questions that we had. So they were like, “Yes, please measure burnout. Please ask about resources, how we can support them.” And so that’s kind of where we are now. We got folks involved because they had similar concerns and were hearing similar feedback from their RAs, so we provided that information to them.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
And the only piece that I would add too, I think Crystal’s exactly right, it was as it started too, I think on our campus, they play such a critical role to helping to support other students, helping to bridge that gap in lots of different ways. That wouldn’t be unsurprising to anybody in residence life. They often actually get tasked and asked to do a lot of different things. So again, COVID really exacerbated a lot of that. But we also initially started seeing this evolving nature of the students who are coming to our institutions.
Again, some of that has been enhanced and some of the challenges have been enhanced because of COVID. But even prior to that, the mental health challenges that we were starting to see, some of those challenges with connecting with one another. And then of course, the impact of social media and things like that. So even prior to kind of COVID and the results of the pandemic, we really saw the students changing. And so does that mean that the RA role… What’s the impact to the RA role? How can we help them be successful?

Paul Brown:
Yeah. COVID really kind of put everything into flux. I remember I was chatting with one of my colleagues who their department had been down this path of trying to develop a curricular approach and really changed the RA role from being policy-centric to one that’s education and conversation and community building centric. And he said, “When the pandemic came out and all of a sudden we became mask police,” he said, “I just watched all of these years of work that we had put in to move the perception and everything of the RA role, just slide all the way back to where it was before.” And he was really disheartened. I mean, that really changed things up a little bit.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
That’s such a good point too, because even prior to that, is it the disciplinarian? Is it a counselor? Are you an advisor? Whereas now, you’re a student role model, you’re a problem solver, you’re a conflict mediator, a campus resource. So I think that some of this too, also, we wanted to understand I think a little bit more too about what types of roles are needed now as well.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. When did you do this study? When was that data collection occurring? You said it was post-pandemic.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
So our first one we did in spring 2021, and so that was just at our institution. And then in the spring of 2022 is when we implemented it at the other institution. So we started here, it started in February and then went through May. So we had over 1,000 students that were invited to participate and had over 300 response, so like a 32% response rate for those other fellow nerds out there that love data, and the validity of it. And so some of that too, of course we only used folks who completed more than 30% of the survey and things of that nature. But we feel really good about where we ended up.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Good response rate on that. So in terms of questions, you started talking a little bit about this. So you looked at burnout, used a burnout scale a as part of that. What were some of the primary areas you investigated in if you were to kind of categorize those?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Yeah, absolutely. Crystal jump in too, if I miss any. So really, we had four primary research questions. One was around motivations. So what are the primary motivations for students who are applying to work in the RA position? And this really stemmed… For those of folks who are unfamiliar with the University of Colorado Boulder, we’re a predominantly white institution. We have a pretty affluent set of students who come. Our in-state out-of-state ratio is about 55-45%, but that means that we have a lot of students who come from California and other things like that. So part of this too became this equity piece that we wanted to understand, especially around motivations. Why are they applying for the position? And some of those different things. Why are they staying in the position?
So the second one was really what do the students who are serving in the RA role understand and expect their responsibilities and experience to be? As you can imagine during COVID, like Paul, you mentioned it changed because you became the mask police, which is not something that’s fun for anyone to have to do. I barely did it in our neighborhood with adult people that I could be like, “Hey friends, can we wear a mask?” That’s really hard. So we really wanted to understand what their understanding of the role was, what their expectations and what types of knowledge and skills they really needed to be successful in the job.
As Crystal mentioned too, our third broader question was around wellbeing. And that became really characterized by burnout and flourishing. So we asked them a lot about that. But we also really wanted to understand what stress management skills and strategies are they currently using? How can we enhance those? How can we support those more? Things of that nature. And then the last bigger chunk was around significant relationships that they have and how does that help them be effective in their role. What did I miss, Crystal?

Crystal Cyr:
So the survey instrument itself was set up to be more quantitative in nature, not a whole lot of open response. So it’s definitely an area to add to. Our institution did ask some open response questions to follow up for some things that asked, like if they said that the time demands didn’t meet their expectations, we wanted to know why. How did that not meet their expectations? We asked some follow-ups around what additional support would be valuable to them, what type of resources did they need to be successful in their role? So we just did that for our own institution for more of a continuous improvement type model. Less about contributing to the research findings, but more about what changes can we actually make internally to help drive this? So we did have some of those additional questions for our own institution. But we also allowed institutions to add their own questions, so they could add up to five additional questions, whatever format they wanted to. If it was open response, we gave them the data and said, “Here you go. You’re welcome to analyze it.

Paul Brown:
You can cover these yourself. There you are.

Crystal Cyr:
We did let them know that. So we had several that chose to add questions and others were like, “No, this is great. This is everything we need. We don’t need to ask anything else.” So they were able to get into more of the nuance local needs and ways that they can improve. Theirs were, again, more focused on that continuous-improvement style, which was really interesting too.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. It’s interesting asking RAs, what do you think you need? Or things like that. One of the things I’ve always found when I go into that question is because the RA is often constrained with how they understand the role as it is, the answers you get tend to be not fixing the issue on a broader scale. They’re trying to fix the little things like, “Pay me more.” Okay, but what if we blew up the positions and they were different and different time requirements? But they usually don’t go to the bigger structural type questions. They’re more remediating the issues within the current system, which is always why I find that data a little bit… Okay, it does sometimes give you some stuff, but it’s also difficult in their role because they’re not thinking on a systems level. They’re thinking on the, “What does this impact me?” I want to get… Oh, go ahead.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
I think you’re totally right and something that we didn’t necessarily add, and Crystal knows this well about me, but I love adding questions. I hate taking them away. Crystal’s the good, like, “Let’s cut this one.” We were just talking earlier and I was like, “Do you have this student development question?” And she was like, “No, we cut that one.” And I was like, “No, not the student…” But I think what you’re bringing up for me too is such a good question and reminder that the majority of students who are in these roles are also between the ages of 19 and 20. And so they are also going through their own developmental growth. So some of the things that we ask of course around are belonging and mattering and that skill development that we talked about before, but I think what you’re hitting on too is how do you understand and evolve into gray areas?
Not that everything is black and white, but how do you continue to understand that there’s gray areas that exist? Especially when you’re then supposed to offer conflict suggestions to fellow students. How do you lead from that space of being only a year older than a student? How do you continue to ask them to do hard things when maybe you don’t understand the hard things that are being asked? And then, the last piece too is how do you help to recognize when they’re in distress, when maybe you don’t even know what distress looks like for you or for others? So I feel like this also is not a piece that we’ve chatted a ton about, but that development piece, what does RA development look like?

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, and one of the motivations I think in people even asking these types of questions or looking at their RA roles is I believe there’s kind of a belief, and I believe it to be valid, I don’t know that I’ve seen data on it, but I think it makes logical sense in that as the position’s evolved, as we do know, our students are bringing more complex issues to campus, greater numbers of mental health concerns. We know that for sure. Has that outpaced what an RA who is typically an 18 to 24 year old undergraduate can even work with? There were some complex situations when I was an RA, 20 years ago, but it’s nothing like an RA would encounter now or with the same level of frequency. And that student population changing, has that gone beyond what an undergraduate peer can actually handle?

Crystal Cyr:
I was just going to say, there’s… It’s funny you mentioned dissertation. I’m studying RA burnout for my dissertation this year. But in my review of the literature, there’s a lot of research as well on RAs and their experience of secondary trauma. And when I was an RA, a long time ago, that wasn’t something that… I recall experiencing to an extent where I am remembering it now. Whereas now, we have RAs that they’re supporting students through a lot of traumatic experiences, in addition to the world as it is now. So there’s that component of it too, of yes, their development, and what’s the exposure of harm to the RAs as well in exposing them to some of these more traumatic experiences, supporting students through assault or harassment or suicidal ideations? What does that look like for RAs?
And are we actually doing them a disservice and causing harm to the RAs because of that expectation of support with, when you’re on call, you might have students in distress and you might have crises that you need to handle? And I think my greatest crisis was a fire alarm over burnt popcorn. That was my crisis and making sure everybody got out of the building, and that was it. I didn’t have to deal with and manage a lot of the same issues that RAs today are dealing with. So I think there’s that developmental component and that what is our moral obligation and ethical obligation to making sure that our RAs are not harmed in the process as well? So that’s kind of a personal philosophy of all of this, more generally speaking as we think about the RA role broadly. I cut you.

Paul Brown:
Well, let’s get into some of those findings. What are some of the things that you think are most interesting, most significant things that listeners would want to know more about?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Yeah. I’ll start with the first two because then I feel like Crystal goes into the burnout, which is just immensely interesting as well. So I would say the primary motivation, by far and away, is financial. That’s not surprising to us. Across the board too, that includes first time RAs, returning Ras. But truly, almost all Ras, 96% said that they were doing it for financial reasons as their initial motivation. I don’t know that we get to 100% in anything else that’s that close, and 96% of them are saying it’s financial. So they also did cite fairly frequently, but to a lesser extent, that desire to help other students, looking good on a resume or CV and wanting that leadership position. Some of the reasons that we chatted a little bit about and found that they were not continuing, which I think is something that’s really valuable to recognize here too, is the role was not what they expected.
Needing to prioritize time spent on their academics was actually something that was pretty significant as well. And I think that that’s interesting because I think we sometimes… I can say this, when I was in student activities, when I did some of the other roles, I would oftentimes forget that they were also students. And then I was like, “Oh.” Remember the times that you have to go to class and do other things? I can also tell you from my time, I did not spend nearly as much time in academics that I should have. So the fact that our students are now recognizing that is really important.
So I would say, again, financial and that specifically included paying for room and board. So we also heard a little bit, one pieces of significant findings is that responsibilities. So they definitely cited building that community, enforcing rules and policy, managing conflict, connecting residents to campus resources, and supporting students in crisis as some of the primary pieces. Keeping students safe, which I think, Paul, kind of relates to what we were talking about before, is that it’s asking them to keep them safe. That’s a huge responsibility that we’re putting on-

Paul Brown:
I mean, that just sounds weighty, right? Safe in what way? In all ways?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
In all ways ever, that could ever exist.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, right?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Yeah. So pretty hard. But creating some of that programming for residents and then helping students to integrate into the institutional community, which again, could mean a lot of things. Interestingly enough, though, only about a third thought that their role was really to form relationships and peer groups amongst residents. So it’s also very interesting, I think, again, from that developmental perspective, what does that gap mean? What does it mean to continue to be that role model in lots of really stressful and challenging times?

Paul Brown:
Well, so that last one, because I want to talk about the burnout part too. But that last one is interesting because I would almost say that’s probably the most important thing or one of the most important things that they do. And a lot of schools-

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
We would hope, right.

Paul Brown:
Right. But doesn’t it really come down to relationships at its very lowest level? And a lot of schools that have started transition to a curricular approach and have started doing intentional conversations or intentional interactions, a lot of them, especially with the intentional conversations, say, “Our RAs are really struggling with this. How do I have an authentic conversation that’s purposeful with these residents? It feels inauthentic. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t feel like I have the skills.” And I think that maybe even speaks to the larger issue that I think is around what your research is kind of saying is if they don’t see that as part of the role or a really important part of the role, and you also said that some of the findings say that people that leave what the job is does not match their expectations of what it is, are we really, are we really communicating what the role is and should be, and are we clear in that?
And I don’t know that we always are. And so are we getting this mismatch of here’s what we’re advertising, here’s what it is? I could go off on that forever. I’ve got-

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
But that’s a good… I mean a job description that’s five pages long, if you’re new to having a job, having a significant role, are you reading that? Are you actually internalizing… I mean, most of them have seen, of course, their RA, but you see one small sliver of what they do. That’s a broader challenge than most of us have, right? In higher ed, do you get the summers off? And people are like, “No, I work all the time. No, no, my job is all the time.” So just generally in the world, there’s a challenge of seeing what it is that people actually do.
And so related to this though is that when students were coming in, they expected to work between 16 and 20 hours. The majority of them said they were expecting to work between 16 and 20 hours. What actually has happened is that the distribution gets a little bit more across where about a quarter of them are saying that they’re working more than 20 hours a week, maybe closer to a third of them are saying that. And then a quarter of them are saying that they’re working between 16 and 20. Some of them are doing really well and working between 10 and 15. And I was like, “How are you doing that?” That feels like I’m choosing to do only the things that I can. And when do we say for students, “You’re doing the best that you can and we recognize that”?

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Crystal Cyr:
Or you only have those 10 to 15 hours to commit that week because you are also a full-time student and hopefully are involved on campus as well. How do you prioritize your responsibilities within that week? When we are asking you to do everything in this role, how do you prioritize? Does keeping students safe just rise to the top and you’re just always on the lookout for things? Or is it making sure your bulletin boards get updated by the appropriate deadline? How do we help them prioritize what needs to be done within the limited time? Because time during the year ebbs and flows for everybody. And so if you get sick, what do you need to focus on that week? And how do we help them better balance what they need to do and be more critical about their time and how they’re investing that time, and that energy in their role when they have limited energy as it is because of their other hats that they’re wearing?

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, because that’s always been an issue with just all residence life staff is that time piece is so variable. Opening, you’re putting in a lot more hours, you have to, but then there’s other points where you have to reduce that. You could obviously fill it up. You could keep trying to run on that level, but there are time periods where you can reduce it and should. And I mean, that’s even hard for professional staff to maintain, let alone an undergraduate peer leader.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Absolutely.

Paul Brown:
It’s stressful.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Very stressful. Well, and so to your point, more than half of them said that their work is often or almost always emotionally demanding.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. It’s not easy work, right?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
No, no.

Paul Brown:
Right. Well… Go ahead.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
No, I was going to say, I think I touched on it briefly and Crystal has heard me chat about this a lot, but the impact of social media and some of that presence too, and having to be overly exaggerated in a lot of the things that you experience too is also a really interesting challenge generationally. This generation of students feels like they have… If you think about Snapchat and having to be overly gregarious on it or TikTok, and that’s how you become an influencer. I’m saying things like I know them, but I don’t actually know… Don’t use either of those platforms. But the things that people end up having to do, it becomes more emotionally demanding. Both from a time perspective where you can literally count the number of hours, but also from that emotional perspective.

Paul Brown:
And that gets into my dissertation research, which I do know about this stuff. It was about the impact of social media on college students’ sense of self and identity. And a big chunk that came out of that, which was not the purpose of my research, was health and wellbeing. And I looked at seniors, fourth-year students, and a lot of them had broken free from that need to always present, “My life is great. Everything’s wonderful,” on their social media channels. But a lot of them said during the course of their four years, they struggled with that.
A student that studied abroad was painfully homesick, was not happy abroad. But because the narrative with abroad is you’re supposed to have these awesome experiences and post all these great things, she said, “That’s what I did was here’s the Eiffel Tower, here’s me eating a baguette.” All those good things when internally she was really just suffering. That’s a hard part about that social media angle. I think that’s always existed, but it just intensifies it in a way that I didn’t have to experience because that wasn’t a part of my undergraduate, right? Social media didn’t exist.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
And that intensity, absolutely. That’s spot on.

Paul Brown:
Well, how about burnout? So you talked about that. What were some of the findings related to burnout?

Crystal Cyr:
Yeah, so we kind of dove into this health and wellness side from the stress and the burnout lens. And so stress, not surprising, nearly only half of the RAs reported that they usually are always experienced a significant amount of stress because of their role. So it was like 45% are experiencing a lot of stress. That’s not surprising, given everything we’ve talked about today. And that the longer that they spend in the role, the higher their stress and their burnout, which was interesting to me because my kind of initial hypothesis going into this, I was an RA for two years, and so my second year I felt more comfortable in the role. I figured out… Well, as far as I knew, I figured out the job and what I needed to do and how to manage my time. And when we shared this out with the different institutions, they were like, “Yeah, that makes sense because our returning RAs are in more of a role model RA position.”
So not only are they managing their own resident students, but new RAs are turning to the returning RAs to say, “Hey, I could use your advice on this. Hey, I’m struggling with this. Hey, I don’t understand this part of my job. Can you help me?” And so we didn’t gather that piece from the survey, but that was a really helpful context that we got in debriefing the results with folks. And they were like, “Yeah, that makes sense to me.” And I was like, “Oh, can we do something about that? What are ways that we can help them to minimize that stress so it doesn’t feel like they’re carrying on an additional weight and burden of holding the weight of the other RAs who are already stressed as it is?”
So that stress piece was really interesting. And then with burnout, the first time we did our study internally, we used the Maslach Burnout Inventory. So validated inventory is used a lot in service-type industries to measure burnout. But what that tool measures is the symptoms of burnout. So if you’re experiencing burnout, how does it show up for you? Is it emotional exhaustion? Is it depersonalization, where you’re kind of distancing yourself from the role? But what that didn’t help us to understand is why are they experiencing burnout? Is it actually the job or is it COVID, or is it something else? And so we switched, when we did the broader multi-institutional study, we switched to the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, which looks at three subscales. So it looks at personal burnout. So important to us when we were measuring this in still a very COVID-heavy world, this is my personal health and wellness, my personal relationships with family, friends, things I have going on outside of my job.
Then it had work-related burnout, which measures the burnout that you experienced because of your job duties, because of the workday itself. And then there was a client-related burnout, which was really interesting to see of do you experience burnout because of your service to your residents and to others? And again, surprisingly to me, client-related burnout was not high. That was the lowest of the three scales. Overall, it was a moderate level of burnout. When you looked at all students across all scales, it was pretty moderate. But it was when we started digging into the data and started to disaggregate by different identities and years in the role that we started to see some fluctuations in responses.
There was variation by gender, by race ethnicity. Basically, if you were not a white male in the role, your burnout level went from moderate to high, and in some cases very high. If you were a first gen or a Pell-eligible student, those also were on the higher end, moved from moderate to high. And specifically work related and personal burnout because… We don’t know, but we can attribute that to these are also the students that are saying, “I’m working an additional two, three jobs and an additional 15, 20, 25 hours a week because I have bills to pay and I am also contributing to my family, and I have things that I need to take care of outside of being an RA.” And so it’s no wonder to see those personal burnout scores kind of go higher.
And so for us, it made us like question, “Well, what is it that we can do to support these students knowing that there are various levels of burnout that’s happening? Having this information, what can we build into our systems, our training, our support, the one-on-one conversations hall directors are having with Ras, how do we can build that out, so that way, structurally…” Because we know burnout isn’t about the individual and their health and wellness burnout is about the environment that you are working in. And so how can we address structures that can help to minimize that burnout in the first place? So they’re not at that point and then being like, “I’m done. I’m not coming back next year. I can’t do this anymore because I need to focus on other things,” is what they’re telling us they’re leaving for. “The time demands aren’t what I expected,” but is it because the time demands are cutting into the other things that you need to do and exacerbating the burnout?
So those are other questions we have about it and an area that we really want to dig into. It was a lot of those differences. And what is it about the job that’s contributing to the burnout that I was like, “Ah, I found my dissertation topic. I am jumping into this.” Full on. So yeah, it was really, really interesting. The burnout piece was a question that a lot of the institutions had because their RAs were walking around using the language. So they’re like, “Is it actually burnout? Is it that they just don’t know how to handle stress? Do they just need coping strategies? Can we help them with that?” And a lot of them had pretty decent coping strategies, but their strategies were hanging out with friends, talking to people. And during a time when you have to be isolated or quarantined, your top coping strategy for managing stress is gone. We’ve just completely taken that away from you and probably have not given you an opportunity to develop a new coping strategy in the process. So it made it really hard for folks, but super interesting data.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
And I might add just that some, just so that you all know what we found in terms of stress and what causes that. The role-related stress was living in a fishbowl, the duty night and on-call and check-ins with other students, and then the time commitment. So all things that we’ve chatted a little bit about. That constantly living in a place where you’re also doing your work, where people can reach you at any point at any time. Those duty nights, that unexpectedness was really challenging for a lot of folks, which I could completely relate to and understand. And then Paul, I think even as we were chatting about those one-to-one conversations, those intentional conversations, those students are also having stress related to that.

Paul Brown:
There you go. There you go. Exactly fits with what I’ve heard from folks. It’s interesting, disaggregating the data and looking at different subpopulations, especially given… I feel like residence life as a whole, most institutions are good at, “We want to create an RA staff that looks like our student body.” So it is very intentional about trying to be look at diversity of identity and other factors in how do you put together a whole staff. I feel like that’s been pretty consistent my whole career and in different schools that I’ve worked at and seen that motivation seems pretty strong. But I think what I’m taking away a little bit from you is it’s kind of that when an institution decides, “We want more international students,” so they recruit them, but then they don’t have any international students services on their office to support them once they’re here, those students are going to struggle.
And I wonder if that’s a similar phenomenon of, “We need to recruit a diverse RA candidate base, but in doing that, we’re not going to change the support mechanisms that we have in place that are maybe unique to this diverse population. We’re going to keep a majority support mechanism in place.” And I wonder if that also has something. Because I don’t know that I’ve seen a lot of institutions delve into that. I’ve seen some do some in RA training. There might be some affinity groups or other things or mentoring stuff around it, but not as common with that. And yet, here we are trying to increase that diversity, but not paying attention to the diversity needs that arises as a result of that.

Crystal Cyr:
Yeah, I think that’s such a great point. And that was something that I was reading about in the literature I was reviewing that when you have historically-marginalized populations serving in these peer leadership roles, not only are they enacting the responsibilities of the role, but they’re also the go-to for, if you have a student of color in the role, they’re the go-to for other students of color living in the residence hall for things unrelated to living in the residence hall, because they see themselves in this person. And so they form that community and that connection, and it’s that kind of additional, “I wasn’t expecting to have to help with identity development during this time, but here I am at 19 or 20 years old helping somebody else with their own identity development, while I’m still trying to figure out my own.” Especially a predominantly white campus. What does that look like?
There’s those added nuanced challenges that I think we don’t necessarily think about. And I don’t know that we not only provide the training and support RAs to be able to handle whatever this looks like and manage this, but also to the call directors or Res Life leadership or other folks that are helping to support them to say, “Here’s how to also support folks that…” Their identity is intersectional to their role, and maybe adding additional layers to the stress or the workload or the emotional fatigue or whatever that looks like. It’s so much more complex and dynamic than I think we really consider it to be because we have a five-page job description. It is very cut and dry. It is clear of what you should be doing and it is not, necessarily. So yeah, there’s lots of room for improvement there, for sure.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, you’ve got my brain firing in all sorts of different directions now. This would be a whole another talk. Our episode would be two hours long if I kept going down this path. But you did make me think of two of your colleagues who just recently finished doctoral degrees. So Laura Arroyo, who’s of course still there at Boulder, and Deandre, who is no longer there, but both looking at aspects of how race impacts professional housing staff, but also living-learning communities and things like that. And so now I’m like, “Oh, now I can see a connection to that and how do we support the students and whatever…” Anyways.
I will include that in the show notes if people want to watch. They also have episodes actually on the podcast, so I’ll throw that in the show notes. But we should probably start to bring it to together here at the end. So if you were to look at your findings and there’s kind of an implication or a piece of advice you’d want to give to one of your residence life colleagues as a result of what you’d see, what is maybe one piece of advice of what they should research, think about, focus some energy on? I always hate to distill your study down into one implication, given the amount of work. But if you did that, what would be that advice that you would give to professionals?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Crystal, you go first.

Crystal Cyr:
Okay, great question. I think for me, it comes back to, I think just my role in assessment, which is don’t be afraid to think critically and creatively about the role of the RA. It’s evolved so much over the decades, and the needs of the RA are different now because the needs of our campus and our student population are different. And so I think we don’t need to be bound by the job descriptions of the past and the models of the past. And we need to think about what do we need now and what do we need in the future? And start from scratch. Don’t revise a job description, create a new job description. Just change it all.
Just think about what would the ideal RA model look like for not just the students, but for the RAs themselves? What does that do to impact student success? How can we help to enhance the student experience of those who are fulfilling the RA role, and not asking them to take on these really intensive leadership responsibilities that are contributing to stress, but how do we say, “We want you to enjoy this experience. We want you to get something out of this as well that’s not just conflict resolution and crisis management. We want you to grow and learn and enjoy your time here.” And so think creatively, think outside the box, start fresh. We don’t have to do things the way we’ve always done them. It’s okay to change, I think is my big implication for this.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
I love that, Crystal. I think that that’s a great point. And I wanted to make sure Crystal got to say what she wanted to first, because I feel like we sometimes have a mind meld at times about this, but I actually am going to take it in a little bit of a different direction. I actually really want to know, and this is my nerdy assessment side, I really want to know what happens to people after they’ve served in the RA role. So post-college, two years out, are there things that have helped them that they maybe didn’t appreciate at the time because they’re right up in it that have really helped them build their experience?
I was in a sorority, I talk about this all the time, learning how to talk to people and doing recruitment, it was the hardest and potentially least fun things that I did when I was in a sorority. But literally, one of the things that I do the most in my roles, and being able to talk to people and understand them and gather some of that really valuable individualized information. So what I really want to know is what happens to students after they leave the RA role and what does that look like post-college?

Paul Brown:
Fascinating. Also, so difficult to probably track and get in touch with those students, but-

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
So difficult. All those things.

Paul Brown:
… 100% fascinating.

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
But if anybody wants to… I would love to do it.

Paul Brown:
Right. Well, and because oftentimes too, folks that go in into student affairs are into residence life, are the people who were already bought into that. And so I feel like, oh, here’s what you get out of the RA role two years later. We look to each other who have done that to be like, “Oh, this is what we got of it,” but we’re also very different from Joe Average RA, who goes on and does something completely unrelated to student affairs. We already bought into it, or we clearly did because that’s the work that we decided to do. But what about those ones that don’t? Anyway, gosh, so much I could talk about. We’re going to wrap it up. I’ll give you one final question too, which is, we have show notes, which will be a part of this, so other things that we can post? Are there any resources you would suggest or ways to connect with you or things like that that you’d want to share if people want to do a deeper dive on this topic or things like that?

Kimberly Kruchen-Spaulding:
Yeah, absolutely. We would be happy to… We have definitely shared our presentation from NASPA, as you mentioned earlier, so we’ll include those in the show notes because I think that’s really nice just to see a lot of the data that we were talking a little bit about. And then you are more than welcome… We’re happy to chat more about the survey itself. And if you’re interested in doing that at your institution, we’d be happy to do that as well. And you can reach out to either of us. I think, Paul, you’ll have the email addresses, but just in case it’s kruchen@colorado.edu. So K-R-U-C-H-E-N@colorado.edu.

Crystal Cyr:
Ditto to what Kim said. Yeah, all of that. We’ll have that up and available for folks. But we clearly can talk about this all day, every day, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, I mean I could.

Crystal Cyr:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
I could. At some point, we will have to do a part two, and we could go off in all sorts of different directions. But I just want to thank both of you for giving your time for this. I just think the work you are doing is really fantastic and something that more people need to know about, more people need to think about. It’s just a really hot topic that I’ve seen a lot of energy around. Also, on behalf of the field, thank you for doing this work because I think it’s really important. So it’s a gift that you’re giving back to us, and we really appreciate it.
So that will do it for this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat. If at any point you have topics that you’d like to see us address, just reach out to Roompact, and we’ll see if we can make that happen for you. Thanks, everyone.