Life as an RA never ceases to be interesting. As an RA, you don’t have to be
handling policy violations or writing reports in order to have something or the other
going on that gives you a story to tell. Take what’s happening around me right now as
an example: I’m sitting at the front desk in my residence hall–Clark Hall—next to one of
my favorite residents. He has his guitar out and is playing songs by AC/DC, Led
Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Guns ‘n’ Roses. With us are one of my colleagues,
my hall director and a friend of my hall director’s. Our conversation over the past two
hours has spanned topics as diverse as the way our weeks have been, life in Hawaii,
food, music and my ability to perform voices of famous characters. Things like this
happen to me every day.
Being an RA is perhaps one of the most rewarding experiences I could ever
have hoped to have had. I’ve laughed and cried. I’ve woken up at 2:30 in the morning
to respond to a medical emergency and checked in about a 100 residents in two hours.
I’ve hosted movie nights for residents to have fun on a Friday night, and I’ve stayed up
all night on a Monday night after having responded to an incident that required me to
invoke our suicide ideation protocol
Through all of this, I’ve learned stress management and time management. I’ve
learned the value of putting my heart and soul into the work I do. Most importantly, I’ve
learned about the value of caring for others, no matter how small the acts that
demonstrate it are.
--Varun Pramanik
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