Job Hunt: Infinity

As student affairs enters our annual Month of Recognition , and we share all of the Warm and Fuzzies of the jobs we do, we should also recognize the knowledge we need to function as competent professionals. Our jobs aren’t just fun and games - we’re also often trained in development, risk and crisis management, and mental health awareness. We should be doing more this month than trying to recruit people and tell everyone how wonderful our jobs are - and how they can just remain in college the rest of their lives. Over the next month, I, along with a few friends (hopefully), will go over psychosocial, cognitive development, racial identity development, sexual identity development, engagement, and success theories. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list, and I had to make choices, right or wrong, of what to include. I’m hoping to hit the main ones that most of us reviewed in grad school, along with some we may have forgotten. As a side goal, I wanted to make sure I had a wide scope...

I haven't written here in a while, but I have been doing some writing. I'm working on a piece to be published in August in a new journal through University of North Carolina Charlotte. My paper will describe a new model to better understand the support systems student veterans have. It also gave me a wonderful opportunity to be surrounded by brilliant people during a writing retreat. I really can't say enough about the retreat. I felt like I was the dumbest one there. Half of the brilliant conversations I couldn't contribute to. I just soaked it all in. I met some amazing people doing even more amazing work. I learned about new best practices, tools, theories, data, and other work being done for student veterans. I love learning and it was like being in grad school again. I also decided on my next degree and even had a few programs suggested. The retreat was early June. Two days after I returned home, after spending one day at work, I had surgery on my left arm. Act...

Career Sustainability I currently work in a position that is not part of a career ladder. I am considered support staff, so there is no clear path for me to make it to a “professional” position. Even if I were to be hired as an advisor, there is no path from there. You can be promoted to Senior Advisor, but (from what I can tell) there isn’t much difference. Even if you work in a position that is part of a career ladder, that ladder gets considerably thinner (and harder to attain) as you move up. There is only one SSAO (maybe) at each institution, we all can’t be SSAOs, it just isn’t possible. When we make the choice to stay in higher ed, when we choose to take part in ladder climbing, we need to be very realistic about what that means. We also need to understand that some people are going to leave student affairs, and that’s totally okay. Again, not all of us can be SSAOs. The big problem is, when is our profession not sustainable? When are we educating too many professionals for too ...

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 have a jumble of thoughts inspired by a few different conversations on Twitter the past few days. They're a loosely linked, so I figured it would be easiest to just get it all down in one post. Let's see if anyone can follow this mess... Opinions Twitter is a place where we share opinions. Sometimes they're part of a larger, planned discussion. Sometimes one person's thought(s) can cause a flurry of ideas and conversation. We share a lot of opinions. Some people share opinions as if they're facts or as if their experience is the only experience. Anything else is wrong or nonexistent. X is the only way to find a job. Y is the only way I can do Z to be authentic to myself. Going through A and B is the only path to take. My problem with these: everyone's path or story is true to them. We can't devalue someone's path because it's different. My favorite ones have to do with valuing our knowledge and skills: If you don't identify with X, you...

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...

Knowledge Communities. We focus on the success of specific populations or interest groups. But, you know, there is some overlap and you can be a member of more than one. Regions. There is some map somewhere that’s color coded and places me (and you) within a region. It allows the conference to be more personable and regions even hold their own conferences. SSAOs. Senior Student Affairs Officers. There was a special track for SSAOs at the conference. These are people who have been in the profession for years, so they (probably?) have different professional development needs than others. (Would some of these professional have benefitted from new research, current projects, and grad school concerns? Probably) Mid-level professionals. People who have been in the profession for more than five years but are not at the senior level. There were several sessions and events geared toward mid-level professionals. New professionals. This speaks for itself really; anyone in the profession f...