“Winning isn't everything, but the will to win is everything.”

This week quote is from Vince Lombardi, the famous American football coach of Green Bay Packers and the Washington Redskins. The Super Bowl trophy was renamed after him after his death from cancer in 1970, and he was inducted into the football hall of fame the following year. He is also well known for introducing the idea of zone blocking, the famous 'Lombardi Sweep' play, and for coaching the Packers during the Ice Bowl (otherwise known as the NFL Championship Game of 1967).

As a highly competitive individual, I love this quote. I never realized until recently how deep my competitive spirit runs, but it's pretty deep. When I tell my students that I will not accept anything less than the best and winning, I know that there's a good chance it won't come through to victory. The best part is giving them that desire and watching them try so hard to make it happen and to know that I played a small bit in that.





The past week has been a huge combination of good and bad, pride and sorrow, ups and downs.

My best friend came to visit me over the weekend. If I ever needed a dose of her friendship, now was the time. I laughed until I cried, ate so much sushi I thought I might explode, and got to go Walmarting with her – an event that I miss more than I’ll probably admit to most people.

Students in my building came together to create some great school spirit in an attempt to win a contest – and they did :) I cannot describe the feeling associated with finally seeing students unite together for a cause other than going out and drinking underage. What’s more, the win has boosted our budget and we can now do many more fun things!

Our football team has reached new levels of bad. I don’t even know if ‘bad’ even describes them at this point. It’s heartbreaking for the students – both the athletes and the fans – and it’s so hard to sell the idea that they should continue to go and support them when they know (or assume) that the team will probably lose in some catastrophic way. I'm starting to wonder if I should stage a coup and take over one of their practices in an attempt to give them the pep talk that I give my students :)

We had another write-up in my building this weekend, and it amazes me what students will get pissed about. Nevermind the fact that they broke policy and had alcohol in the building, the more important fact (to them, of course) is the fact that the RAs had “no reason” to knock on their door and follow up with them from their noise violation earlier in the evening. These students thought that 3am was a PERFECT time to try and talk with me about the situation. While they didn’t knock on my apartment door, they did stop me outside on the sidewalk as I was walking outside with my friend after my RA called me about the situation. And then (because of course, it gets better) they didn’t understand that I don’t actually work ALL THE TIME and were insistent on trying to find me the next day to talk more about it when it would be convenient for them. This in turn created the first time that I’ve actually had to get snippy back with students because of their attitudes towards me. And then they don’t understand why. I remain amazed by this entire ordeal.

The good thing about everything that’s going on right now is that every passing day puts me closer to more unstructured time in my office and the sweet release of Thanksgiving break. I will shop, play Rock Band/Guitar Hero, sleep in, and enjoy that I have no one else to be concerned about but myself. Then I’ll just have 3 more weeks to get through before I have a lovely 2 week break for the holidays.

I can see how people burn out on residence life. I’m not to that point yet, not at all, but I think next year I will do a better job of structuring my time and not waiting until October to finally leave campus and get away. Even next semester – while I know I will be busy with various things (including teaching!) – if I don’t find time to get away and escape I will probably lose my mind. I have already started thinking about spring break and what sorts of things would be fun to do. And then there’s May which means the end of my contract for the year, a fantastic vacation, and then possibly back to work for a month before I get a whole other month off and the chance to roam around the country visiting family and friends. Despite what the calendar tells me, it doesn’t seem that far away at all :)

"The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships."

This post's quote is from Anthony Robbins, a self-help writer and apparently famous for various seminars and the tactics he uses to sell his point. I'm not very familiar with it, and I won't even go as far to say that I buy into it at all, but I like the quote.

As I read through the other blogs on studentaffairs.com, I’m starting to see a trend. It’s apparently that time of year when nothing seems to go right and everyone is ready to absolutely scream. I can buy into this – last week I could not WAIT to pack up and get out. I had fun weekend plans and I wanted them to start immediately, without any of this work stuff getting in the way. I was a whirlwind as I packed, cleaned up my desk, tore through my to-do list, and hit the road. I had a fabulous weekend with some fabulous friends and I’ve returned energized and ready to charge through the next 5 weeks.

At least, that’s how I feel today. Yesterday was a mish-mash of feeling sorry for myself and being sad about other people. I teared up twice in my office during the day (email exchanges full of emotion and reminiscing of good times will do that) and then ended up crying later on in the evening while I was talking about everything that was going on. Thankfully my evening took a turn for the better, and so now I’m looking forward to seeing what might happen with a new situation……

Okay, so I’ll just put it out there. I might enter the new realm of trying to date while having a full-time job. Up until last week or so I didn’t think I was ready to handle it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to balance my job with my personal life and learning how to make time for myself in a world where I’m always at work. It’s been a rough transition, much more difficult than I anticipated. I find myself with plans every weekend (you don’t understand how much I love having coworkers that are my age that share similar personalities to my own) and spending the evenings during the week trying to catch up on sleep and recharge for the next day. Now I’m starting to see that I’m a little bored with myself and maybe I’m ready to try sharing my time with another person. Maybe.

My dating record is full of mistakes and smudges across the page. I’ve made some good friends over the years (I’m proud to say that I still speak to almost everyone that I’ve ever dated) but haven’t ever found someone that could put up with me just as much as I could put up with them. But now things could change, and after a 10 month hiatus from being in a relationship, maybe I’m ready to give it a go. Maybe.

As for everything else, it’s shaping up to be a beautiful fall. The weather has finally turned cold – cold enough that the heat got turned on in my building yesterday – and I feel like fall weather is here to stay. The sun still shines brightly and the campus is looking more beautiful than I even imagined that it could. My job is still busy (although will slow down quite a bit in the coming weeks) and I still love what I do here. With each passing week I feel more and more comfortable with my position here, and now that I’m achieving career satisfaction it might just be time to get some personal satisfaction as well.

"Every leaf speaks bliss to me/ Fluttering from the autumn tree."

Today's quote is really two lines of poetry from Emily Bronte, the British novelist and poet from the 1800s and one of the famous Bronte Sisters - all of whom were successful writers and published under male pseudonyms at the time. Emily is remembered for Wuthering Heights. (For those interested, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Ann wrote Agnes Grey) Both Charlotte and Ann published additional works - Charlotte published the most but all of the Bronte Sisters would die young before their talents could be fully developed. [Despite my background in literature, I haven't read any of these. This is probably a tragedy in and of itself.]




It's that lovely time of year when fall is really setting in - weather starts to cool off, leaves start changing colors, I start wearing socks again, and then my building goes absolutely nuts.

Maybe I should say that students in general start to go crazy. I'm sure that it isn't isolated to my building or even my quad of campus. My usually quiet building has suddenly gone topsy-turvy and things are happening all over the place. Roommate situations are moving from a slow simmer to a rolling boil, beer pong becomes an acceptable weekend activity (ha!), and people run around all crazy because they simply can. I stand in the midst of it all wondering what's going on and thinking that it must be time for fall break and that's why people have suspended all views of reality.

Other than all of that, there hasn't been much interesting stuff going on. Students are studying for midterms and I'm preparing to start my first round of meetings with those students whose academic attempts have come up a little short. We're preparing for homecoming festivities and Halloween and programming within the hall is starting to pick up a bit. My staff seems stressed out - from their own coursework and also because they are starting to realize that there are two very short months left of the semester and most of them still have a lot of programming left to do. I know that it's probably time to do a little staff development, but no one seems like they want to do anything fun together that isn't thrown together a mere 10 minutes prior. Or maybe they just don't want to do anything that involves me - either way, it's not giving me very much to work on.

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I am choosing to spend it on my couch in front of the TV. One of the very best parts of being a professional is not having homework to do on the weekends and being able to be as lazy as I want to be :)

“Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it”

This quote is from W. Somerset Maugham, an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer who was most popular from about 1915-1940. This quote works with the theme of today's entry, but also the theme of the world today. Reading my daily USA Today has gotten a bit repetitive and bleak in the past days.




I wish I could sit and tell you about all the wonderful and interesting things that have happened since the last post, but not a lot has occurred. At least, not a lot that stands out in my mind. The days blend together in a blur of appointments and suddenly so do the weeks and then I've lost all track of time and I don't know what's going on at all. Welcome to the professional life.

I have a busy month ahead of me, with homecoming festivities and Halloween (always a big deal, no matter what campus you work on) and looking forward to Thanksgiving and winter break. One of the best parts will be getting my first official visitor, the same wonderful friend who helped me move here, who will be returning to hopefully experience a much more calm and relaxed version of myself.

In the meantime, I was reminded in the past week about the wonderful professional development allowance that I am given and all the fun things that I can do with it. I had forgotten that it existed and that I didn't need to worry about paying for some of the things that I'd like to do, since I have the money available to take care of it. So now I'm stuck trying to figure out what exactly I want to use it on.

Some of this is a given....I want to attend ACPA again so I'll be paying my membership fee and conference registration fee, and travel/hotel fees with the money....but if I get to be a part of recruitment at the conference (which I am DYING to do because of my own ACPA experience), then I've heard rumors that I don't have to use my development funds because the college will pay for everything. This means that suddenly there are other conferences that I could attend and books I could buy that I hadn't even thought of before! And being the nerd that I am, I'm already starting to look around and think about what exactly I'd love to see the money used for.

The best part about having this development money is that that means more of my personal money is available for more fun things, like travel! And clothes! :) One of the best parts of having a real paycheck and being an adult is having the ability to decide that I want to take random trips to random places for no real reason. Not only is it exciting to be a tourist and explore, but it's always fun to get out of town and leave the college kids behind. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my residents....but I also love having conversations with people over the ages of 18-22 and getting out of the residence hall.

"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies."

Quote from Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who was a student of Plato and a writer on many subjects, perhaps the most famous being his works on the formal study of logic and the physical sciences.


[I wrote this yesterday but in between meetings and programs in the evening it didn't get posted.]


Today was a day of blogging – both reading and writing. I’ve been amusing myself in between appointments and meetings by reading a blog written by one of my staff members this summer while he traveled abroad. Then I decided to wander over to studentaffairs.com to see if anything new was up, and I discovered the graduate student blog and read that. Man, did that take me back. The ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ blogger sounds exactly like me when I first started my program two years ago. I can remember feeling incredibly lost in classes, watching all these second years (and more assertive first years) interacting and commenting on issues that I hadn’t even thought of. I had been interested in student affairs for a good year (at least) before I started the program, but coming from a small residence life program (and a small institution in general) left me way behind in many ways. It wasn’t until my second year of grad school that I really started to feel competent. Things started making sense, I started having more things to say, and suddenly I was feeling like a real professional. But back in the first year, in those beginning days, I was miserable.

I picked up and moved for school and the only person I knew in the area was the guy I was dating at the time. He didn’t support me in my pursuit of a masters degree and had little patience listening to me whine about all the work and the awful time I was having. A month after classes began we went our separate ways. I would leave class feeling defeated and spend parts of the drive home crying about what I should do about my life. As I started to make friends things got better, and after the first semester (when I took the worst combination of classes that anyone in my program could possibly take) things got much easier.

Which is why when you go back and read my parts of the 2008 Job Search blog I was so devastated to move away and leave all of that behind. And that’s also why I still have a hard time coping with being away from the past two years of my life. So fear not, those grad students out there who might be feeling something similar, it will all fall into place. You just have to push your way through the bad in order to reach all the good.

Life these days has been rather interesting. I’m developing the sickness that most of those around me have already had. This makes it hard to concentrate and feel like my usual peppy and upbeat self. I’m having students miss or cancel appointments at a rapid rate – something that I have no patience for, or tolerance, and that my schedule cannot accommodate. My staff has started programming at a rapid rate, and so my building had a program last night, another one tonight, something tomorrow night, and another is already planned for next week. As they find their groove I know things will only get more active and fun around here. I knew my “pep talk” that I gave them a few weeks ago would pay off eventually.

So I’ve been my usual busy self, but I’m finding more down time during the days than I anticipated. This is in part because of the appointment woes that I mentioned, but also because I’m actually (dare I say it?) ahead of the game. My desk is clean and free from all the random papers that I’ve just been pushing around. I have neat piles of important things and my files have been organized. My office has been rearranged (I got sick of it after less than two months) and I feel like it’s a lot more user-friendly for myself and the students. I am caught up on email and have even cleared out my inbox from random other things that were hanging out there. While I know that this won’t last, and as my schedule heats up even more I will probably lose this calm and confident feeling, for now I will enjoy the fact that I am a cool and collected professional, ready to conquer the world!

"Ugly naked guy is having Thanksgiving dinner with....ugly naked girl!!"

The quote in the title will make sense when you get to the end of the entry. Or, if you're really good, you already know what it's from.



Things with work are getting busier, but somehow I'm feeling more organized and put together. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: being crazy busy and stressed just makes me get more serious about whatever the issue may be. I'm in the office early so I can sort through all the emails from the evening before and then in between appointments and meetings I'm returning calls and emails and keeping up on everything. Some days are really long, but other days (like today!) end up being fairly short and easy to deal with.

My frustrations with my staff are starting to even out. I think they could sense my restlessness about the issues and are starting to become more productive. Things are happening in and around the hall that are positive, and this helps me feel like I'm doing something right with my job and staff.

We've also been dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Ike - something that I wasn't expecting to have to encounter where I work. Between debris and power outages and kids gone crazy, it's been a hell of a week. I can't wait until I have some sort of normalcy restored.

All the news about the economy has me thinking about big picture issues that I never thought I'd have to worry about yet. I've already been faced with picking a retirement plan (hmm....something I should probably decide on rather soon...) and I've been thinking about annuities (which still don't completely make sense to me) and one of my friends was telling me that she has a CD (which seems cool and interesting but I'm not quite sure I understand all about it) and this same friend yelled at me when she found out that I didn't have a savings account (which doesn't mean I don't have a savings....necessarily....it just doesn't have it's own account yet. I've been BUSY!). I need a financial manager or something. Or at least someone who can explain all of this to me. Being a grown-up is rather difficult business.

Meanwhile, here I am watching reruns of Friends because it's a Thursday evening and I have nothing to do :) Plus, this seems better than planning my future. This episode is from the first season and it's the Thanksgiving episode. Now I can't stop thinking about going home for Thanksgiving and eating until I want to vomit. Black Friday shopping with my mom (if she's brave enough to handle it!)....taking naps on my parents' couch....spending countless hours with my best friend. All squeezed into a few days. Wonderful happy thoughts to get me through the rest of the week.

"To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult. "

This post's quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. I think this quote perfectly goes with how I'm feeling, but I'm laughing hysterically on the inside that I would pick a quote from someone who is well known for his beliefs on postmodernism and existentialism. [Friends from college would maybe get this, but this could be my own joke inside my head. Either way, it's amusing to me right now.]

Today has been one of my introspective days. I've spent this week listening to people comment about how down or melancholy I seem to be, which is totally in contradiction to the actual good feelings I've been having. Well, mostly good feelings. I can't help but feel icky inside when I miss important events (birthdays, pregnancies) and when I just can't be there to give my best friend a hug. Things have happened this week that have left me wishing I was at home.....well, at my multiple homes that I feel I have. But on the work front, I've actually felt a little bit better about things.

For the first time since training started, the items on my desk are relatively under control. There are still some things I need to manage, but for the most part I'm happy with the state of my office affairs. I'm finally feeling like I'm finding my professional niche....or at least starting to worm my way into what COULD be one. And as I start to feel more in-control with the general aspects of my abilities to do my job, I start to realize how incredibly frustrating other things are. The topic for this discussion is my staff.

Don't get me wrong - I have been blessed with having a phenomenal group of people work for me. They are all talented in their own rights and I love them each dearly. Lately I've been struggling with their motivation....or general lack of it. I know the students here have their own unique culture that doesn't fit with the types of populations I've been involved with before, but I don't feel like that's a good enough excuse - or really that excuses are acceptable at this point. You're here to do a job, and you're doing it with this certain type of community. They have no desire to program. They see most requirements as a chore. I have basically been hung out to dry on an event this weekend that I seem to be having to completely run myself. I feel like no matter what I try and do they will be pissy about some aspect of it. And now I'm pretty much fed up with the entire situation.

I know that as a first-time supervisor I have made mistakes along the way. The entire month that they've been here with me has been a learning experience, with each week yielding more things that I have to discover how I will handle. Yet I'm starting to wonder if either I a) completely suck at supervision and motivation; or b) command no respect from anyone. Or, maybe it's not me at all and my staff is just really not feeling doing their jobs. None of these choices are acceptable. A change must occur.

So I will spend this weekend trying to figure out the best way to approach the situation. I hate to give a million deadlines for every little thing (I provide some, but not for everything), but I feel like I'm being pushed to the point of having to really take a look at their performances and wonder what I can do to help them along. It's not everyone; of course I have a few that are stellar and keep my hope alive that everything will be okay. But the ones that are starting to push my buttons are really stomping on them. Tonight I will stay up later than I should and mull all of this over, trying to come up with answers that I know won't come. And I'll also lay on my couch and wonder what's happening back at my homes, wishing I could be everywhere at once and feeling like I can't control a thing.