Being an RA

Posted by Braden

Being a resident assistant (RA) this semester has been so much fun! A few of my favorite moments this past month:

1) I got a call on my landline phone in my room from two girls that went something like this:

"Hi, this is Braden, the RA of Kimball Hall. What can I do for you?"
"Um . . . we're locked in our room. Can you come help us out?"
"Ha ha, wait, what? You're locked IN your room?"
"Yeah, I know it's kind of pathetic. But I have class in 30 minutes, and I need to get out of here. So you can come unlock it?"
"Yeah, I'll be right over!"

So I went on over, and sure enough, they were locked in! Their doorknob had come lose so that the door was stuck in the closed position, and turning the knob did nothing. Well, we (their hall RA saw me come in, heard their story, laughed, and came with me) got the master key and started jiggling, and the key grabbed onto something that turning the knob wasn't grabbing. We were able to get the girls out in time for class, and we called maintenance to come fix the door. So far I've helped eight people who were locked out of their rooms, and just those two girls who were locked in.


2) In the student development class that you have to take while you're an RA, they go over what to expect this semester. Here's the gist of it:

"Right now it's January and nobody wants to be back at school. By February everyone will have hooked up, so expect more PDA. In March residents are getting bored, so you'll probably see more pranks. In April all the boys are going to be experiencing reverse-trunkiness; they see no point to school, they just want to be on their missions already. Good luck!"

Then we went over how to handle all of those phases, of course. I found the cyclical nature of each freshman class amusing.


3) One of my dormmates, sick of answering the door when I'm not home for people who need their rooms unlocked, has posted a sign outside of our door that says:

"Braden, the RA, is:" followed by a flippable sign that says, "OUT. Go Away!" on one side, and "IN. Come on in!" on the other.

4) Part of being an RA is organizing events and programs with which to spend our allotted hall budget for the semester! A few that I've incorporated since "taking office":

a) The "stud- or dud-of-the-week" moment in hall meetings. Anyone who had a particularly brilliant date or terrible shutdown from a girl that week tells his story, and the person with the best one gets a candy bar! Now that's male bonding time if I've ever seen it!

b) Cleaning checks are not enjoyable. To make them less painful, I added an incentive: after cleaning checks each month, I'll have a drawing to see which room gets two free large pizzas. Tenants qualify for the drawing by signing up for a cleaning-check time on the sheet outside my door before a certain day, and by not having any rechecks. I've found that the boys are significantly more motivated with this added incentive.

c) For the hall activity this month, we had a mission-deferment party! Almost all of my boys needed to defer their academic enrollment and scholarships before leaving on missions this summer, so why not do it all at once and have food at the end? One of the girls in our ward who works at the administration building brought the forms and showed everyone how to fill them out, and we had chips and salsa as soon as we finished.