Learning Patience

I have been applying for job after job, and am just waiting and waiting for anyone to get back at me.  I have not gotten any rejections lately, but am still playing the waiting game for every job I have applied for.  It is interesting to me how long the processes take in higher education to hire someone.  I was also amazed last semester at how long it took our office to actually hire somebody in the Academic Success Center after the job posting.  The posting was up for at least two weeks, and then the week before fall break, we applied four people.  No one was offered the job until after school began for the spring semester.  I am looking at other jobs, as well, outside of higher education, as I would like to work in training and education for companies.  Those jobs, however, would move a little faster and I need to work on my resume for jobs outside of higher education.  It feels very confusing to me that I spent all of this time, energy, and money and am not necessarily completely committed to working at a college.  It is important to me, but I suppose as long as I am working with people in a similar capacity.

This job search is forcing me to become more patient and focus more on the present.  There is so much about job searching that is out of my control, which really bothers me.  I am having to learn how to focus more on what is under my control, which is focusing on my school work and working on myself.  I've spent a lot of time this semester already on trying to be more organized and working out and being generally healthier.  Hopefully I can keep up the healthfulness after graduation.  Something tells me it may even be a little bit easier without all the homework!

Making it through.

I feel, at this point, like I am struggling to get things done.  It is the third week of school, so I don't think that it's good that I am so overwhelmed by everything.  I wanted my last semester to be enjoyable, applying for jobs at my leisure (sort of) and having plenty of time to do my schoolwork and being involved.  Turns out, my work is piling up.  I'm trying to keep up, but it's tough.  For example, on Sunday, I worked for 9 hours straight and still didn't get enough done, but I was too tired to continue.  I hope this is harder than having a job, because I'm not sure I could keep it up for that long.

While I am overwhelmed, I have been very organized and I do enjoy my classes.  I am having to reflect a lot (of course) on my experiences and what all of them have meant to me.  I am so looking forward to moving on in a few months and finally starting my career, I just hope that my anxiety about finding a job doesn't get in the way of enjoying my classes and getting the most out of them.

I have been applying for at least a job every week at this point.  Hopefully more jobs around Ames will start springing up so I can stay around here for a while.  Things are getting increasingly complicated for me (which leads to more stress), and I'd really like to be able to stick around for a while.

Attitudes Toward Sexual Violence and Student Affairs Work

Please read The Huffington Post's recent article on the FBI changing their archaic definition of rape.

This article is so important to me because sexual violence prevention is so important to me, and I am so glad that there seems to be so much more media coverage of the language we use in society and how we are defining sexual violence.  However, I do think that I also have to consider the source.  I think The Huffington Post is pretty widely known for being a liberal news source, so the people who need the information the most may not be getting it.  Victim-blaming attitudes and a lack of understanding of the complexities of sexual violence are pretty wide-spread, however, so I still think it is incredibly useful.

Why is this important knowledge to have in student affairs?  Well, because student affairs professionals, I think, should have a broad base of knowledge of the challenges that students may face during their time in college.  As the article says, there is much recent research that shows that 20% of women will be sexually victimized in their lifetime.  Many of those young women (or men) may be college students we are working with.  How do we respond as student affairs professionals when a student confides in us?  While it is important to refer students to the appropriate resources on or off campus, I think that may sometimes seem to students that you--the person they confided in-- does not know how to support them in that situation by affirming their feelings or knowing what might be the wrong thing to say.  As a student affairs professional they trust, you may be the first person to which they divulge this very sensitive information, and saying the wrong thing (such as a victim-blaming comment/question) may make them unlikely to get the help they need from the resources you refer them to.  Of course, I think it is hard to know in every situation what will be exactly the right thing to say to that student, but it is important to have an idea.

In my final semester of graduate school (or after, but hopefully it doesn't take that long to find a job!), I am hoping to find a job that I can educate students on the impact of sexual violence on college campuses and how to prevent sexual violence through education and programming, which really calls for attitude change that will ultimately (hopefully) create a cultural shift in attitude.

I know that the jobs that would allow me to do this are not numerous, but I do think that even if I do not get a job doing work with sexual violence prevention and education right away, I still may work with students who need support after experiencing sexual violence.  There are many other topics that are also sensitive when working with students, and I will be constantly striving to educate myself on those topics so I can best serve the students I am working with both now and in my future student affairs career.