Whitworth provides many opportunities to become student leaders, and students who live on campus will be familiar with the roles of Resident Assistants (RAs), Associated Students of Whitworth University (ASWU) members and Campus Ministry Coordinators (CMCs). While the job descriptions for these roles are easy to come by, the actual impact these jobs have on student leaders is a less common story.
Two Resident Assistants, Noa Lovegren and Justin Roth, spoke on what it means to be an RA.
Lovegren mentioned struggling to find community prior to becoming an RA and dealing with feelings of isolation as she navigated her freshman year. In contrast, she said that there “is nothing like being an RA to make you more involved in the community.” She has found that the RA role has expanded her network and created multiple connections for her across majors and peer groups.
In terms of her RA peer group, Lovegren said that all RAs are different and approach their jobs differently, but are connected through a shared role in the community. She spoke of the RA class, GE-330 RA, as a special experience because “it is like a little battered army together showing up to class,” and the shared pressures that an RA can feel create a closeness that other students might not relate to.
Roth did not have the same struggle to find community as Lovegren, finding spaces within the Ballard and McMillan (BMAC) community “initiation” and the Track and Field team during his freshman year. He considered the change in community as an RA as one of entering a place of “creating a community instead of being a part of it.” Roth spoke on the leadership culture of being an RA as one connected by a desire for “what is best for the people you’re living around.” Like Lovegren, he emphasized that there are a lot of different ways to live out the RA role so that the community becomes a shared goal, not a shared journey.
A different student leader community exists for CMCs. Chansol Park, Tommy Chase and Aubrey Jones are three CMCs who gave some insight.
Park framed the change for the community that he found when becoming a CMC as one where he now reaches out to people to be a part of the community, rather than people reaching out to him. He defined CMC culture to be one of “grabbing coffee,” using the framework of a shared drink together as a way to create the connections that the CMC role emphasizes.
Park stated that, while he values this ability to reach out to others, he can find himself overwhelmed with the amount of engagement and events he attends, feeling burned out. Likewise, he highlighted that he might lose some of the benefits of being a participant in these events, but in exchange, he has gained ministry work and deeper human interaction through leadership.
Chase spoke on similar lines to Park, saying that while he has always been very active and engaged in the community, his CMC role granted him more incentive to reach out to first-year students and gave him “eyes for people that I may have otherwise not really prioritized.”
The CMC team is significantly smaller than the RAs, with about 50 current RAs and only 12 current CMCs. Jones remarked that this smaller size creates shifting communities within CMC teams over the years as they respond to the spiritual needs of the campus. Like the earlier RA reflections, she spoke on how each CMC has their own spiritual gift that they use within their communities. Chase and Jones both considered the current CMC team to be a close-knit and outgoing team.
The third major student leadership position is senators and other ASWU positions. Eli Roberts, the current Boppell senator, spoke on his perspective along with Gwen Brantner, the current club coordinator for ASWU.
Roberts said that being a senator at Whitworth came with immediate built-in friends through his leadership team, especially during their orientation week prior to the start of the academic year. He found that being a senator offered him many opportunities for student engagement and community building. In simple terms, he said, “wearing a name tag [at events] puts you in a position where people can come and talk to you.”
Roberts also said that the senator’s role has given him insight into the way Whitworth handles the community behind the scenes, revealing that “Whitworth as a personal group and as a faculty that is actually very student centered and appreciates student input.”
Brantner had similar reflections to Roberts. She had a further connection to Whitworth’s community as the club coordinator, knowing all the club leaders across campus. For Brantner, her ASWU position allowed her to feel that she did something during her time at Whitworth. She said, “to me it’s important and [one of] the things that I do to not feel like I’m just kind of floating through [her time at Whitworth] and to know that I had some impact on what is going on on campus and help people do things that they like to do on campus.”
Brantner acknowledged that holding a role in ASWU made her “business” more out there in public awareness, as people will approach her in conversation around ASWU decisions. She found this to be overall positive for her as it aided her ability to talk about issues on campus, but hindered some of her ability to maintain a work and social life balance.
Of the seven interviewees, every single student leader remarked that they had no regrets in taking on their leadership roles. Brantner stated that she wished she had engaged earlier, because these roles have had a positive personal impact on them during their time here at Whitworth.
