Resident Assistant Application Research Paper

Words: 1330
Pages: 6

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what motivates you to apply for a Resident Assistant and/or Community Educator position. Include experiences you have had (leadership, community service, employment, residence hall living, campus involvement, multicultural awareness, background, etc.) and how they have influenced your decision to apply.
Many experiences have led me to applying to be a Resident Assistant. The most important one was the sense of community that I felt my first year in the residence halls. As a freshman I decided to be in the Civic Leaders Living-Learning Center to live among a group of like-minded people to help me acclimate myself to college and my first time away from home. My RA, Brandon Myers, created a community
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I am a nonprofit management major with two minors: educational studies and education policy. I want a career where I can inspire others to live up to their fullest potential by giving advice or providing resources to them. My drive to inspire and assist has led me to apply because being an RA will just be the start of my career. In the summers, I am employed at a camp for ages 4-15 and worked with the 5-year-olds this past summer. Over the course of the summer, I was able to work with the kids to create a community within our camp. In one specific case, I helped a child who had autism thrive in camp. At the beginning of the summer, he had multiple disciplinary problems, but after working with him to see what he needed, I was able to get him to interact and play with the other kids without him acting out. To see the change just one summer made in the child’s life affirmed that I am on the right track in my career path, and I have a feeling that being an RA will make a similar impact on me. While my experience was with 5-year-olds, I know that I can be as much of a resource and mentor for college students because I have and year and a half of experience living in a college dorm and remember that feeling of being excited to meet new people and experience all that the university has to …show more content…
When I first found out who my roommate was, I contacted her and we decided to meet up before the move-in date. Upon first meeting her, I realized she was not nearly as empathetic or tolerant as I am. When we first met, she wanted to know where I had gone to high school, so I explained how I went to a public school in Indianapolis. She immediately presumed that my school had “thugs” because we were from the city. She went on to point out that I probably didn’t get a good education because of all of the “distractions” with going to a public school in a large city. Then she went on to say that Indianapolis was a terrible city, in her opinion, and how she just didn’t care much for anything from there. I was obviously offended by her statement, but I made an effort not to react emotionally. She had a bias for her home town, and I could understand that. Then I gently explained to her how I loved my high school and I received a very good education despite the fact - and in many ways, because of the fact- that we had a very diverse community with students from every single walk of life. Her insensitivity to my hometown was so unexpected, but through that situation, I have learned to have empathy for people who do not come from a big city, and have not had the same diverse cultural