If I thought that I’d found a really good resource in studentsaffairs.com, then I really hit the jackpot when it I found NASPA.org. This website is basically the jackpot of resources when it comes to Student Affairs research. I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time on this website doing research and I think it’s probably one of the best resources out there for people trying to peruse something in student affairs. Not only because it gives you just an enormous amount of information right at your finger tips, but because its easy to use and navigate.
The main page is pleasing to the eye and gives you some basic statistics, which, for me gives me a good sense that this is a good tool to use. Then it has different tabs that let about the website, Events, Research & Policy, Publications, Careers, Constituent Groups and then finally Focus Groups. What I think that I like best about this resourceis that it holds an annual conference, which brings recruiters and schools to the students. Which I found that StudentAfairs.com did not do.
But if your like me and you’re just looking around, they do have a job exchange section that is really easy to understand and use. But my only complaint would be that unlike studentaffairs.com these listings are not hyperlinked so you see that the listing is there but you have to go to the school website on your own and find the qualifications. So I feel for me, they really want you to go to the conference that they hold.
Another great feature of this website is that it allows me to search for schools that offer my program to my specifications, which again is not something that studentaffairs.com had. You can search under different qualifications like “do you want a GRE score” or “Do you offer scholarships” it even lets you pick whether or not the you want it in a rural area, town, or city and whether or not it’s a small or large school.
All in all when it comes to comparing the two websites, they’re both good in their own way. I think that I will probably use this one to help me narrow down a school in which I want to go, and the other site to see whether I can find a good job there.
The more and more I think about what I want to do with my life, the more I really feel like where I belong is in High Education/Student Affairs. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and I’ve found some great tools to not only help me find programs that I like, but also possible jobs to help me while I’m going through my masters program.
I think that the job that I’m really looking to do while going through the program is either in Student Involvement which is where I’d really like to end up after I get my masters, or as a Hall Director/Building Director. I’ve worked in housing for the past three years, I’m pretty familiar with the basic procedures that most universities have, so it’s a job that I’m confident that it is a job that I would be able to do well while doing my studies.
The website I really want to talk about is studentaffairs.com might be the backwards way of doing things but what I’ve really been doing is researching on this site to see what schools are offering the job I want in which I meet the requirements and then looking to see if they have the program I want. A lot of the times I’m left feeling disappointed. But I’ve come up with couple-promising candidates for schools. I also have to keep in mind that I can’t apply to any of these jobs/schools yet because I have another year of schooling. So I’m hoping by this time next year I’ll have more promising leads.
This website also has a lot of other create features like a resume center, which allows you to post your resume that way you can easily access it to apply for the jobs that are on the site. Also if your resume is on file employers can search for you on the website and access your resume. They also have another great feature, which is the Conference Center, which gives you the dates of conferences which are usually for recruiting.
I wanted to share a little bit of inspiration with you guys and gals. This video speaks to me on a lot of levels, because the messages he’s saying are so positive. Everyone says them, everyone can relate to them on any level. But do we ever listen to them? Do we ever believe them?
So to give you a little background on this guy, his name is OlanRogers on youtube, and I recommend checking him out because he has some of the funniest video’s I’ve ever seen. But that’s not what this post is about; I’m not promoting his youtube channel in anyway. What I want to do is talk about his video; I want to talk about what how it spoke to me, and the lessons that I’m taking away from it.
So, this is a little documentary video about this guys tour, where he went around the country and had a “pizza party”, and met with his fans. He’s so humble, at one point at the beginning of the video he is so surprised when someone comes to tell him that there are 20 people at his event early on and he is surprised that 20 people want to meet him. This speaks to me, because I feel like as we get older and more things come to us, we forget to be humble and appreciate the things that are given to us.
Later on he talks about how he feels like he’s failing at this tour because people have to wait to meet him. Even though thousands of people are coming out to meet him, even though he’s exhausted and his feel like they’re going to fall off… He feels like he’s failing because people have to wait to meet him. He tells his friend that he feels like his failing, and his friend simply tells him that he’s got his back and Olan starts to break down.
He says, “that’s why you surround yourself with positive people”. This part is not only touching but also true. I think that there s a lot “every man for himself” mentality today. People are too wrapped up in themselves to care about other people. But then there’s the 10% of people, and to think that I’m included in this group of people. Who actually care about the people around them, who will “have someone’s back” and actually appreciate it when it happens to them. I also think that we need to surround ourselves with positive people more often. Because, it’s so easy to get caught up in being negitive, feeling sorry for yourself all the time. If we surround outselves with positive people, we invite positive energy into ourselves and therefore it forces us to be happy. I think that there aren’t enough happy people in this world, and it makes me sad.
“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself”
– Charlie Chaplin
This is the quote that he has right after this segment. I think this quote speaks volumes. People are always afraid of trying new things, they’re afraid that if they try something and fail it makes you a weaker person. For me I know this is true. I spent my two years at the university I attend completely miserable, getting the worst grades in the world. All because I was stuck in a major that was completely wrong for me, where I was uninspired and couldn’t comprehend a thing that I was was learning. But I stuck with it for two years because I was afraid that if I change my major that it meant I was a failure.
It literally took me having an emotional break down in front of one of my best friends, who was tutoring me at the time to realize, hey you need a change. So the next day I saw someone in the career center at my school, took some tests, talked to some people and in the middle of my junior year of college… say it with me JUNIOR YEAR I changed my major. A lot of people told me I was absolutely crazy, a lot of people made fun of me behind my back for not being able to hack it in my old major. But my true friends, the “positive people” in my life, they were so happy because they saw how miserable I was before and said it was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders after.
You see change and positive people can literally save lives. Because I can guarantee you that before I made this change, I was so unhappy that I swear I probably would have just dropped out of college. I thought about it literally everyday. But I took a risk, a big one and it paid off. Sure I still have no idea what I’m going to due with my life, but say by day. I’m realizing that even though some days I feel like a complete failure at life. At least I’m a happy failure and I’m attempting to figure my life out.
Around the 7:50 mark, is where my true inspiration started to really kick in. this is the point where I realized that I actually wanted to share this and talk about it a bit. He says, “I hope you those of you who are feeling discouraged right now know that you can do anything that you can put your mind to.” He later says, “There will be people who will say you can’t make a living out of this, you can’t make a living out of something that you love to do. But are you really living by not doing it?” I could go on and on with quotes from this segment. But really you just have to watch it to feel the powerfulness of it all.
I feel like we have a lot of people tell us this, from a young age our parents tell us, our teachers tell us, our friends tell us. But I honestly, from my own personal experiences don’t believe this. Either what we want to do is too hard, or it’s scary or its something else. We make excuses to justify why we can’t do things. But we have the capacity to do whatever it is that we want, and I wished more people had an outlook like this guy… Hell I wish I had this guys outlook because, like I said at the beginning of this long, over drawn almost rant like post, its inspirational.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the future. This week especially, because it brings about a pretty important birthday….25. While I might understand if some people might think I’m completely crazy for thinking that being 25 really isn’t that big of a deal. You should know that for me, it’s an extremely big one. I’ve had some trouble admitting to anyone and myself that I’m 25 years old and still in college. But I’m going to be as honest as humanly possible on this blog, because I feel like if you can’t be honest with your writing there’s no point to writing at all. Plus this blog is supposed to be about going on a journey and finding myself, and if I’m not honest with my readers and myself then why am I doing this?
I feel like I need to give a little bit of a disclaimer, because what your about to read is purely my opinions on my own life and no one else’s. So if I offend anyone at all I apologize. This is just me freaking out about my own personal baggage and I in no way mean to offend anyone.
So here it goes…. For me being in college at 25 is embarrassing for many reasons. The first being that everybody that I graduated high school with seems to have gotten his or her crap together and I still have no idea what I’m doing. To me I feel like, as you get older you should also be wiser and have this vast untapped knowledge that you can bestow to the world, and I feel like I have none of that. The second thing is that all the people I graduated high school with, who went onto high school already graduated college and has already started their lives. So I have this constant feeling like I’m behind in life and need to catch up.
I’m not naive enough to think that any of this matters in the real world. I know that I’ve experienced a lot more and been through a lot more things that I went to high school with have. But in the back of my head, there’s this constant little voice telling me that I’m falling behind in life. I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that I really have no idea what I want to do with my life. Even though I kind of think that I have some kind of an idea… I feel like the fact that I literally wake up in the middle of the night having legitimate panic attacks about turning 25 and where I am in my life. I think that means that I need to explore other possibilities because I may not have found the right one…
So I think that I’m going to start researching other interests that I have, and seeing if they are lucrative career paths.
As a senior in college, you would think that I’ve gotten my act together and figured out what exactly it is that I want to do with my life. While I think I have a pretty grounded idea, this idea only came to me exactly a week ago while having a conversation with one of my superiors at my job.
I work for Housing, Residents Life and Dining Services, and have done so for the last 3 years of my life. During this time I have enjoyed watching and guiding the residents that I’ve worked with in the right direction to achieve their ultimate goal. While having absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my own life. I have inspired residents to change their majors to something that would make them a lot happier, I have encouraged residents to become active in their academic careers and get involved not only in extracurricular actives but with housing as well.
So while at a recruitment fair trying to answer as many questions for people wanting to get involved in this organization, my boss asked me to share my story about how I got involved and what made me want to keep coming back. She’d known me for all three years I’d worked for housing, but never really knew how it was I came to be a part of this organization and why I loved it so much. So I explained to her that when I came to my university, I was not only a transfer student but an older non-traditional student as well. I was ignored, treated horrible and I almost transferred to another school because I was so miserable; all within the first month of my first semester at this college. But then, on my birthday my freshman year, I met the building director and ended up having an hour long conversation with her, which was unheard of because they are usually so busy. After that meeting, she encouraged me to work for housing, and while I’ve had my ups and downs within this organization it was the best decision I’ve ever made.
After hearing my story, and talking about why I wanted to stay, we started talking about how transfer students are an under-recognized and under-appreciate member of most campus societies. This is also a sad thing because it makes up a much larger portion of the community as well. So we started talking about it and she asked me if I’d ever thought about going into student affairs and working with transfer students. Well, I work for housing and at least everybody who has worked for housing has at least thought of working for student affairs at least once in their careers. But after this conversation, I really started to think about it; I started to think about how I’ve interacted with the residents that I’ve worked with and I realized something… this is a completely viable career for me, in which I can picture myself doing.
Do this blog is about my journey, trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. Figuring out if I actually do want to work get into student affairs or if I want to do something completely different.
Finding my way, 