Goodbye to #SEORL Residence Life

This week marks my departure from the Office of Residence Life at Southeast. While I will still get to work with Residence Life as the AVP for Southeast, it is of course not the same. I’ve enjoyed working with some great people in Residence Life and any success in my career is a product of the time so many professionals have given to me. I hesitate to name people, however, there are some who have been on the Residence Life journey with me for many years in the central office of Residence Life that I must thank for the time we worked together: Jim Settle, Gwen Duncan, Kendra Skinner, Allan Mauk, Bruce Hanebrink, Kim Fees, and Vicki Schrieber to name just a few. Of course there are many Hall Directors that I have had the great opportunity to work with and the energy these professionals bring to Residence Life is one of the things I enjoyed most about the work in Residence Life. Every year there seems to be some new funny story that only Res Lifers understand, like can my son get an extra key so we can pay a house keeper to come to his room when he is at class to clean it? Or can you not assign me to a room with my best friend, even though we requested one another? I don’t want to tell him/her that I don’t want to live with them. The diversity of challenges that working in residence life provides is difficult to match in higher education. Few other offices get to touch so many areas of campus life and for this I am thankful for the past 14 years of time in the Office of Residence Life at Southeast.

I am very confident in the new Director and look forward to seeing her vision and direction of the office. We are fortunate as a University to have had a talented Associate Director ready to step into the Director position and after only a month it is clear to see the University’s decision to select Kendra was the correct one.

I promise to try and avoid meddling in Residence Life too often. Of course on occasion I still plan to come back to my old professional home and to keep things interesting I won’t call before making the trek from the south side of campus just to see how things are going.