A day in the life of an RA

Life as an RA (Residence Assistant) is a pretty sweet job. You get to hang out with your fellow RAs, make friends with all the incoming frosh and returning students and earn some money while doing it. As potentially incoming students, you won't be assuming the role of RA (at least not until your second year that is!), but RAs will play a big part in your life while you live in residence, which I hope you'll all be doing! (Photo - Ryan and I on duty for Harper's toga party!)

Alright, so what exactly does an RA do? First off, they're older students (so either 2nd, 3rd or 4th year students, but 2nd year seems to be the trend) who are employed by the University through Student Life to kind of act like older brothers and sisters to those living in residence. They do all the typical stuff like making sure that everyone is following quiet hours which are different in every residence though the average seems to be starting at 10:00pm on weeknights and starting at 2:00am on weekend nights. They're able to fine students in the residence who break rules and the money goes to the residence house council in most cases. The RAs get the fine money for things that they have to deal with personally, such as... vomit. Ah vomit, what a fun part of the job this lovely substance has turned out to be. But more about that later.Stephen, hanging out with some frosh during a weekend duty :)

But other than the kind of run of the mill things that an RA can do for you, they're trained to be prepared for all kinds of different situations from fire alarms to suicide intervention to boyfriend/girlfriend issues to academic problems to course selections. Basically, your RA is there to help you with whatever they can, to listen to what you have to say and to point you in the right direction when you need more than they can give you. As an RA, I was surprised to find how incredibly rewarding it became to be the person that others turned to for help and guidance in a number of very different situations. I was also surprised how much I came to care about the people on my wing and how quickly we became like an actual family. Everyone on my wing seems to know where the others are at any given time, who has construction paper you can borrow, who so and so has started dating, who's turn it is for recycling or who's birthday is coming up on the weekend. There are no secrets in residence, and when living in this kind of environment with 19 other people, you can't help but feel attached, proud of and close to the people you live with. (Photo: Dancing frosh on their way to the Pub!)

One of the more visible roles of an RA is what we like to call "duty". As an RA you typically have three duties per month - one Thursday night, one Friday night and one Saturday night. There are two RAs on duty each night and their job is to sign residents' guests into the building, make sure everyone and everything is running smoothly throughout the house and generally deal with any issues that come up. Some typical things that we deal with are hilarious residents who may or may not be slightly inebriated, breaking up overly rambunctious room parties, hanging out with lovely visitors, cleaning up/dealing with vomit in all of its wonderful forms (the least fun part of the job, but also what happens the least), and occasionally putting out fires in the outdoor garbage can, hahaha. Definitely fun when you get to whip out the fire extinguisher... bahaha. Well fun, but not funny, because fires are serious... ahem. (Photo - Members of a Celtic gang (?) offering entertainment for RAs on duty.)

So yeah, being an RA is a seriously fun job, though there are certainly moments when you just don't want to deal with overly loud techno music at two in the morning or really have the time to listen to the same story about so and so's cheating boyfriend. But hey, we do it because we love it and because we love the people we live and work with, and at the end of the day it's all worth while and I wouldn't change it for the world.

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca

A reading week with very little reading is the way it should be!

Well it's been back to reality for a few days now, though the reality part hasn't really hit me yet. I really do still think I'm on holiday, as for the past two days I have somehow managed to stay in bed until at least 11:00am... So brutal, haha. My body just hasn't gotten used to the normal schedule of going to sleep sometime before 3:00am - sounds like trouble. (Photo - Fellow guide Ben (McMaster) and I out at The Brig in Ottawa)

So yes, I'm still relishing in the beauty that is reading week, though I'm still unable to figure out why they call it "reading week". I mean honestly, very little reading usually gets done, though there are those select few who are just incredibly hardcore and get like, a paper written or a book finished or some serious lab work done or something crazy like that. But me - oh, no - no reading for me! The only reading I did was finishing one novel and starting another, just for pleasure - what a novelty! But besides that, my break was absolutely awesome. As some of you may know from having read a few of my past blogs, I worked as a Parliamentary Guide in Ottawa last summer and met a ton of great people, a lot of them who still go to school in Ottawa. Sooo, I decided it would be a fantastic idea to head out to Ontario for a little over a week and do some serious visiting and catching up with my wonderful guide friends. And this is how it went! (Photo - Jess, Tejas, Liz and I in downtown Ottawa)

I got to Ottawa on Friday night and was enthusiastically welcomed by two of my best friends, who were also guides last summer, Liz and Tejas. Liz went to Mount A last semester but now goes to school in Ottawa, where her family lives, and Tejas is from Vancouver and also goes to the University of Ottawa. We were an inseparable trio during the summer so it was just awesome to be back with the two of them :) I stayed at Tejas' apartment in downtown Ottawa for the week and it felt like we were an old married couple by the end of the week, haha. She had a big week of work and I was on vacation so I had tons of time to spend doing whatever. So, since I live in residence and go to meal hall and all that, cooking and grocery shopping and all those things are a bit of a novelty to me so I would go grocery shopping, cook us dinner, bake dessert.... Hahaha, it was so much fun and made Tejas pretty damn happy so it was great :) (Photo - Tejas, not looking too impressed at the paper she was writing during my visit)

Some highlights from my time in Ottawa included some serious shopping (put a student from Sackville in a big city with a large mall and watch out!), meeting up with my high school volleyball coach who now lives in Ottawa, visiting my apartment from the summer and my most lovely roommate Martha, heading back to Parliament to see the sights and Question Period with a Kelsey, a friend from MTA, and going out on the town with as many old friends as possible :) (Photo - Parliament Friends: Andrew, Marc, me and Ben at Zak's Diner)

So my time in Ottawa came to an end and I hoped on a Via Rail train bound for Toronto and then bussed to Hamilton to visit my friends Ben and Zsuzsi who both go to McMaster Univeristy. My trip there was pretty short, only a few days, but we had lots of fun nonetheless. Ben showed me all around campus, I went to see McMaster's production of Cabaret, checked out a house party with people from his programme (Arts & Science) and even managed to get a chapter or two read for my Islam class, haha. And then on Sunday afternoon I was off to the Hamilton airport, where I met a friend from Mount A, Mal, and we flew back to Moncton together. Since then I've been attempting to get back into the swing of things here, but really, I'm still very much in break mode. I'm having too much fun and not getting enough work done, but hey - we all know university is about more than the academics! (Photo - A notice to McMaster medical students in the Health Sciences Library, just in case they couldn't figure it out)

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca