Job Hunt: Infinity

I am not in student affairs. I have never worked professionally in student affairs. I have no experience on my resume in the student affairs category. I don’t know if I’ll ever work in student affairs. So, why, you may ask, am I posting about Careers in Student Affairs Month? It’s a great question. A wonderful one, really. Sometimes I ask myself about why I call myself a student affairs professional often, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes all the time. Sometimes I have other things on my mind and I don’t think about student affairs at all. I think about student success. I think about that more than student affairs. I think about how we define student success, how we encourage success, how we measure success, how important success is, the milestones of success, and the headlines about success. I think about silos, too. I think about how we silo people so that they can’t share resources, goals, or expectations. I think about how those silos affect our work with students, and eac...

I attended a session on exploring if Student Affairs is a profession. It wasn’t an us vs. them conversation, it was a group of professionals from different fields and view points discussing if student affairs is a profession according to their lens. There was someone from NASPA to give the association standpoint, someone who looked at SA through an anthropological lens, another through an historical lens. It was really interesting. One person in the Q&A portion mentioned that this type of session continues the us vs them mentality, and I respectfully disagree. We should be critical of ourselves and our profession. Here are some of the things this session made me think about: Do we need grad programs? Perhaps we should start picking up outside professionals and gear professional development toward theory and professional practice to bring in diversity and cutting back on the reliance on Student Affairs Masters Degrees CAS standards How to move more programs to following sug...