Brandon Ormeroid pushes a cart with his belongings during move in day 2012. UW Residential Life and Dining Services said it has made changes to the staff structure and responsibilities to improve students’ experiences with on-campus living.
Residence hall staff has seen a shift in positions as a way to give more back to students.
Currently, two area coordinators oversee the residence halls, divided into East and West positions.
In past years, four area coordinators oversaw residence halls, which include White, Downey, McIntyre, and Orr, along with Hill-Crane.
“When I met with the current Residence Life staff, we talked about how we were pretty big staff-wise. We had four area coordinators, two assistant directors, and one associate director and the associate director supervised all six people,” Executive Director of Residence Life and Dining Services, Patrick Call said.
The staff thought the area coordinator positions were trying to take care of too many things at once, so they reduced to four positions to two and made some responsibility changes.
“When we looked at the area coordinator position, we realized that it had its feet in two different places. One was in the day-to-day management of the building as well as training, conduct and policy, and procedure. We decided we were a little top-heavy,” Call said.
After reviewing the positions, Residence Life and Dining Services decided it was time to make some changes to better benefit students. Call said after analyzing the previous structure of the residence life staff, he did not believe it was as centered around the students as it should have been, so it was reorganized to form a staff that would focus more on students.
A big part of the focus has been on training the residence hall staff to better serve the students, Area Coordinator Rian Rabideau said.
“A lot of our focus now has been planning and implementing training and overseeing community development,” Rabideau said.
Area coordinator Jenni Lindberg said she and her department are now trying to expand their outreach to the whole campus.
“We’re charged with continuing participation across campus. We’d like to continue and increase our collaboration with our other campus partners. We’re looking to do programs in the residence halls as well as on campus and how we continue to keep students engaged with not only our resources, but with our campus resources,” Lindberg said.
The staff not only wants students to have comfortable living facilities, they want them to be successful in school as well, Associate Director William Evans said.
“Our unit is now called residential education. We wanted to name our sub-unit based on what we do, which is really education outside the classroom. We want to support their academics and for them to be successful and to graduate while being integrated into the campus community,” Evans said.
In addition to the changes made for the associate director and area coordinator positions, new positions were also created in the reorganization.
The residence coordinator is a new position this year, which is similar to the hall director position from about 15 years ago.
Residence coordinators are intended to properly train the resident assistants, make sure the front desks of the halls are functioning properly, keep the hall senates lively and to develop a community among the residence halls, Call said.
“It’s not that our area coordinators in the past didn’t do those things, but when your time is split you can only do so much,” Call said.
Call also said the residence life community does not stop at the residence halls.
To make sure the apartments were still a part of UW residence life, a residence coordinator position was added to oversee the apartments, including Bison Run Village, Spanish Walk, River Village and Landmark.
Even though apartments are mainly for upperclassmen and are different from residence halls, Call says it is still important to create a community for all residents.
Bison Run Village is a mixture of the residence halls as well as an apartment complex. In the residence halls, most residents do not know their roommates prior to moving in, whereas when students move into an apartment they generally rent one with people they know.
At Bison Run Village living facilities are not leased per unit, but rather per bedroom. In most cases there are people living together who have had no prior relationship, which is similar to the residence halls but with the conveniences of an apartment, Call said.
“That’s something that we really want to focus on. We want a community in our apartments just as much as we do in our residence halls,” Call said.
Though residents my not be aware of the changes or directly impacted by them, Call says he thinks it will be beneficial to them.
“I really do think this is going to be a good organizational change for us. It has the mind-set that we’re here for the students and we’re going to continue to look throughout our entire department and focus on customer service and putting the students first in everything that we do,” Call said.
