By JC Stoner

When I was an Assistant Director of Residence Life at the University of Texas at Arlington, “Liz” was an RA, but not in my supervisory umbrella. Based on community placement, Liz started the semester with the community development deck stacked against her for two reasons: (1) she worked in garden-style apartments; and, (2) her community was comprised of many student athletes.

Liz spent the entire fall semester trying to connect to the women’s basketball team in her community, with limited (if any) success in the transactional and countable ways on sociograms and assessment reports. Every time she knocked on their doors, nobody answered (even when she could see shadows moving through the peep hole). Any time she managed to catch one of them in person to invite to a program, they were “too busy” or “had practice”, even before she told them when the program was. But Liz persisted, which brings me to my all-time favorite RA story.

Towards the beginning of the spring semester, the women’s basketball team had an away game coming up. As I recall, it wasn’t even that special of a game. It wasn’t like a crosstown or division rival, so it wasn’t a game people were talking about. Student Affairs certainly wasn’t coordinating transportation and bus logistics to get students to demonstrate school spirit at a game several hours away.

Liz took it upon herself to hand write notes to the women’s basketball team in her community. Nothing extravagant; just something like “hey good luck at your away game this weekend. Building 28 residents are all behind you and we will be cheering from afar.” And the response Liz received? None whatsoever. But that’s okay because this is when the story starts to get good.

Fast forward two months to when it is time for the RAs to do health and safety inspections. Because inspections were a team effort, all the apartment RAs divided up rooms across all the communities which meant it wasn’t guaranteed that any RA would get their resident units to inspect. As it turns out, Liz’s inspection list included a woman’s basketball player’s room. Liz and her RA partner knocked, received no answer, keyed in, and then inspected the apartment just like every other apartment.

But this apartment wasn’t just like all the others because there was something Liz recognized taped to the vanity mirror in the bathroom. It was the handwritten card Liz had clipped to the apartment’s front door two months prior.

While I love this story for many reasons, the primary one is that it had a happy ending for Liz, who was over the moon feeling validated in her efforts. To help hammer home the point, I told Liz, “I don’t know about you, but I typically don’t hang meaningless crap on my bathroom mirror. I hang important things. Things that matter to me.”

This story is also a reminder that all too often our frontline staff never receive validation for their efforts, but that does not mean those efforts are in vain. Whenever I share this story, I am regularly amazed at the nuts and bolts of everything that had to transpire for Liz to experience this elevated moment. Truth be told, it was sheer happenstance. Another RA could have been assigned that room inspection. The letter could have been in a scrapbook of important moments. There are so many random things that happened that created that moment for Liz, and had the shifting sands of the operational landscape changed even slightly, Liz would have never have realized how much her effort mattered.

This story constantly reminds me that all too often our most junior staff don’t receive the validation of their efforts; but more importantly, it reminds me that those moments of connection exist even if nobody saw them.

But that also means that sometimes it is our job to help staff realize they matter above and beyond just simply saying “I’m sure there is a handwritten card hanging on someone’s mirror somewhere.”

J.C. Stoner, Ph.D.

Director of Housing Systems and Services

University of North Texas