RAs simulate opening day move-in

Mock move-in brings back freshman-year memories for RAs.

4:42 p.m., Aug. 19, 2005--Each of UD’s 183 residential advisers (RAs) and 34 hall directors were handed a TV Guide-like booklet as they checked in for training this week--the first clue that this year’s training was going to be different from previous years.

Diversity training was dubbed The Real World and the annual retreat at a Maryland camp was dubbed Survivor, but the biggest change was a switch from lectures to “experiential learning.”

Each RA spent Wednesday night bunking in singles, doubles and triples in the Rodney Complex--simulating the experience new students will have when they move into UD residence halls Saturday, Aug. 27.

“We want them to experience this as a student does,” Franklin A. Newton, assistant director of Residence Life, said. “Instead of us standing up and talking about what it’s like to experience check-in, they’ll actually experience it.”

There were mock move-ins, make-believe cranky parents, even what to do when a resident inadvertently lifts a desk and knocks the head off a fire sprinkler. And, of course, what to say to the parent who brings an assemble-it-yourself bookcase and wants to know when the facilities staff will assemble it. (They don’t.)

Dan Lenker, a second-year R.A. from Middletown, was assigned a double room for one night with another second-year R.A., Mike Keller of Lewes. Lenker said he preferred this year’s approach to the lectures last year. “When you do it, you actually take it in,’’ he said.

“It’s like reliving my freshman year,’’ Lorimar Pena, a first-time RA from Lambertville, N.J., said. “You kind of remember all the good things but you forget waiting in that line. And, I just found out I got a triple.”

Leigh Fine, a hall director who was an RA at Kansas State University last year, said he preferred UD’s hands-on training approach. “A lot of these RAs are going to be running into situations they will run into this fall. This is also a good way to meet the rest of the staff.”

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photo by Sarah Simon, AS ‘06

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