- Tyler Wiggs,
Manchester Hall RA
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Tyler Wiggs, a senior resident assistant for the twelfth floor in Manchester Hall, stops to speak with one of his residents, sophomore Yo Satake, while he makes his rounds while on duty Monday night. (Photo by Kristen Wegrzyn / Staff Photographer) |
NORMAL –– I sat listening to what a typical day on the job was like for Tyler Wiggs. He attempted to hide his frustration for the job while gritting his teeth and looking at me with bloodshot eyes.
“It’s stressful at times, but I enjoy it overall,” Wiggs said nonchalantly.
Wiggs tries his best to comply with the struggles of being a student and also an RA on the 12th floor of Manchester Hall. Wiggs has seen many students pass on the RA position because of how time consuming it is.
“Some people wrote a page front and back of suggestions because they thought it was so hard,” Wiggs proclaimed.
His smile showed no sign of the pride one might expect him to feel at the moment. But he was clearly happy about his ability to tough it out for the entire semester.
“There’s a lot of stuff to do as a student and an RA, so it’s about balance,” Wiggs said.
He went on to give an elaborate and tedious sounding description of the job that caused him many sleeplessness nights.
The words rolled off his tongue so naturally, yet a slight unease could not detach itself from the message.
“I feel like it’s been busy this semester… probably because it’s senior year,” Wiggs explained.
As an outsider looking in, Hanna Supanich-Winter began her stay at the university this semester as a junior transfer student and theater major.
The tone of Supanich-Winter’s voice told me she had a very cynical outlook on dorms as she described her expectations of an undesirable experience that turned out to be just the opposite.
“I felt like I’d be living with freshman and sophomores that are really immature, so I wouldn’t have been able to relate that easily,” Supanich-Winter said. “When I decided to live on a themed living floor, I saw that there was a transfer floor, and I thought, ‘Oh that’s really awesome.’”
According to Allbusiness.com, the estimated number of students living in dorms in 2009 is around 6,600 people, which means a third of ISU students currently live in one of the residence halls. Of those 6,600, most of these residents consist of freshman and sophomores who are required to live in the dorms. Supanich-Winter is glad to be a transfer student as she is ready to move to an apartment.
“I don’t want to have to deal with all the regulations anymore,” Supanich-Winter said. “It’s nice having them but at the same time it’s too many restrictions to have to worry about. Then also there are people being dumb on the floor that I don’t want to have to deal with. They wreck things and everyone gets fined for it.”
Supanich-Winter said that although she had problems with living in the dorms as a transfer student, having Wiggs as an RA made the situation a little better.
“Whenever I see him around, he is always asking how I’m doing,” Supanich-Winter said. “And he’s very concerned about how living on the floor is going for me.”
Wiggs agreed with Supanich-Winter’s comment. He said as an RA for the second time, this semester has been much better for him in comparison when it comes to helping people out on the floor.
“Well, last semester there was one person on the floor who kept bothering me with complaints,” Wiggs said. “And it’s nice to know that she felt she could come up to me and talk about these things, but I wanted to spread out my attention to more than just one person. This semester I feel like I got the chance to do that.”
One of the main complaints Wiggs had, besides the hard work and dividing his attention, is the infamous “RA on call” duty and the disbursement of punishments that go along with it. As an RA on call, the RAs are required to patrol through the dorms looking out for policy violators such as people making too much noise.
“One time last semester I busted these people for candle violations when I caught them with candles in their room,” Wiggs said. “And after that they literally fought me on everything I did which was kind of frustrating.”
Wiggs continued to reminisce about catching people violating policy this semester. I couldn’t believe how idiotic he made some of these people sound.
“We [RAs on call] had one time this year where residents were drinking with the door wide open,” Wiggs said. “So we didn’t even have to knock, and we were just like ‘guys you want to put that in the middle of the room?’”
Wiggs felt these types of violations are bound to occur at some point. Meanwhile, certain activities and preemptive measures are experimented with by the RAs.
"We have our first floor meetings for this kind of thing,” Wiggs said. “And there are some emails I’ll send out to let people know about quiet hours and stuff like that because sometimes people just don’t know about the rules.”
Overall Wiggs thought he did a nice job as the floor’s RA. A time consuming job that humbled him significantly is now coming to a close. As he sits and reflects on what he could have done better, he said he did not hang around the floor as often as he would have liked.
“I felt like I definitely could have been around more often,” Wiggs said. “It sucks because I got so busy this semester, and I was in the computer lab a lot really. So, with things like people getting busted and noise complaints, I was barely around, or I was in my room doing homework.”
Having learned about the life of an RA and the views from his resident, I notice my worldview shifting into a broader perspective. This is a job many college students will pass up in their four years at the university. But at least knowing about the experience might help residents understand what their RAs are there for.