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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | Published February 7, 2008

Resident Assistant applications are in for the 2008-2009 school year, and the RA Selection Committee will begin to conduct interviews, which will last from Feb. 13-17 and will be followed by deliberations on Feb. 29 and March 1. Decisions for the next group of RAs will be made on March 5.

According to Associate Dean for Student Life Myrt Westphal, the process of selecting RAs and alternates is a long and arduous one, but it is one that is critical for providing students with a fun and safe college experience within the dorms.

“We’re picking student leaders because … you’re known on this campus as an RA. If there is an emergency in the woods or at a party or whatever, RAs step up and try to diffuse the situation or help. So we want people that the community admires,” Westphal said.

The RA Selection Committee is responsible for selecting RAs from a pool of applicants who are interviewed in both semesters of the school year. This is done for the sake of applicants who have been away studying abroad or on leave during either of the semesters.

“We have to do the first round of RA interviews after the application materials are due in the fall,” Jenna McCreery ’10, a member of the RA Selection Committee, said. “This year, we had our first round of interviews at the end of November. Then, we took that information and filed it away.”

According to McCreery, this process is repeated “in the spring after the applications were due on February 4th.” The applications asked students to answer a number of questions that relate to the RA role and to share personal experiences that would be appropriate in attesting to their ability to be an ideal candidate for the RA position.

The interviews then seek to discover similar aspects about the candidate but through a more discerning approach. Each applicant is interviewed by a group of three members of the committee and a dean. Each committee member is responsible for being present at approximately 13 interviews over the next two weeks.

According to Westphal, “We look at the applications, student by student. We talk about strengths and weaknesses and think about whether they have the characteristics that we think would make a good RA, and students get ranked at that time,” Westphal said.

Applicants are ranked into groups based on their possibility of being accepted, denoted by a “definite yes”, “maybe yes”, “maybe no”" and “yes for certain circumstances”, among others.

The following Sunday is then reserved for evaluating their decisions and checking whether or not their rankings were made correctly. According to Liz Derickson ’01, Coordinator of Residential Life, RAs are chosen according to how well they will fit the various duties required of an RA.

“The RA role has three main parts. There is the counseling and mentoring piece of it, there is the authority figure piece of it — enforcing the rules and helping the dorms be a safe place to live - and the social director-building community on the hall and helping folks connect to each other in a social way. So, we kind of pick individuals that have strengths in all these three roles,” Derickson said. One potential factor when deciding whether a candidate could be an RA is whether the candidate is in danger of being overcommitted with academics or extra-curricular activities. “Often the people that are turned away are those who are over committed and don’t have time,” McCreery said.

“A lot of people underestimate the time it takes to be an RA and the dedication that you have to have to your hall.” Although no one would doubt that a student should be committed to learning first and foremost at the college, the duty of an RA should rank high among a student’s priorities, according to Westphal.

There is also a sense that applicants, as representatives of the college, should be individuals who have genuinely come to value their time at the college and wish to provide the same positive experience for their peers. Dominic Lowell ’08, a current RA and a member of the RA Selection Committee, is looking for applicants who have “a desire to give back to Swarthmore, to share their Swarthmore experience, to serve as counselors for students.”

One of the most important aspects of the deliberation process is the idea that applicants must work well together as a team within a dorm building and within the greater RA community. “I think you have to look at all kinds of different qualities because I think being an RA is being part of a team and realizing that maybe one of your strengths is going to be helping out someone on your team,” Lowell said. Throughout the deliberation process issues of friendship or notoriety are downplayed by maintaining a basic level of transparency. According to McCreery, efforts in the selection process are made to lessen biases within the committee. “I don’t think it’s a very large factor … because chances are there are a lot of people who have an objective view of the applicant. I would guess that that is why the committee is so large.” “We are [also] told not to interview anyone that we are more than acquaintances with,” she said.

The process continues until accepted RA applicants are placed into both dorms and halls. RAs for the more “specialized dorms” — dorms further away from campus, single-sex dorms — are considered first, according to Westphal.

“We tell RAs that after academics, being an RA should come first. So we feel that it’s a really important job … RAs touch every single student that lives on these campus halls. That’s our ideal,” she said.

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