Soaking it All Up

I worry sometimes that others may see me as a student affairs professional poser. After all, I work in Alumni Affairs. It's no secret that my passion (go ahead and roll your eyes, I said passion) lies in working with students. But these students are future alumni and I can only hope that they have as great an experience as an alumnus as I'm having, so why not encourage them early? I'm thankful that in my current position I have the honor and responsibility of supervising the hiring of and daily tasks of three student assistants. One is a current undergraduate sorority woman and we've built a relationship over the past couple years so that she trusts me enough to come to me with her Greek life-related issues and questions. I feel incredibly honored that I've built a relationship with a student like this and it only feeds my desire to work in this field even more.

So, I'm on Twitter as much as I can be, soaking up all of the great #sachat nuggets. I follow several blogs in my RSS feeds. I have an #sagrow mentor (thanks Chris Blackburn, you rock!) thanks to Ed Cabellon, who also rocks. I connect with student affairs staff on campus here as much as possible and volunteer for everything they'll let me be involved in. I'm pretty well obsessed with student affairs recently. Ironically though, my classes are boring the heck out of me this quarter!

I'm currently taking Leading High Performance Organizations, and Managing Campus Operations. The program itself is a little disorganized (what's the due date for this first project again??!!) and the professors I've had for the most part haven't seemed very engaged. Not only that, I'm more interested in my electives for my concentration - how much longer until I can take Critical Issues in Student Affairs or Safety & Crisis Management or Diversity in Higher Ed...?  Oh yeah, at the end... sad face.

To make matters complicated, we MAY be moving soon if my husband gets stationed elsewhere. Right now, it's possible that we may be moving to Virginia. On the one hand, I'd be happy to return to a state I love, but I would be sad to leave my current position. I really like who I work with, I have a sweet office with a window, and the work that I do is pretty enjoyable. I feel like I'm part of a community even though I never attended this school and that's a pretty unique feeling that I'm sure other higher ed professionals can attest to. Though one day I'd like to move up and branch out, I feel like I'm in a good place for me right now in my life and I'm worried that I may have to fix something that's not even broken...