Case Study Team by Ryan Podolak

SIU Residence Life has some great things going on, and we want to showcase some of our proud moments on our blog. We also hope people considering working in RA, graduate assistant, or full-time positions with our department will take a minute to learn more about the things we are doing. More information about our department, including position descriptions, application information, and graduate and full-time staff profiles can be found on our recruitment website. Today's blog post was written by Ryan Podolak, Hall Director in Neely Hall.

During the months of December (2012) and January, five members of the SIU Residence Life team entered the 2012-2013 ACPA (College Student Educators International) Winter Case Study Competition presented by the Standing Committee for Graduate Students and New Professionals and the Standing Committee on Men and Masculinities. Our team included Hall Directors Brian Gallagher (our team captain), Jac Jewell, David Keys, and me (Ryan Podolak); as well as Coordinator of Residential Leadership and Engagement, Justin Schuch. Brian received word of the case study through the CSPTalk Listserv.

Ryan and David performing in the case study video

The case study was distributed on November 30, but we knew we wouldn’t be able to dive in until break. With the halls closed for Winter Break and fewer evening commitments, we had some time on our hands. I will spare you the details of the entire case study background information given. In summation, we were charged with helping a father of three children, who was in his mid-forties, had a high school degree, had been working in a factory but was recently laid off. He is attending the community college where we are an academic adviser. We’ve been asked to advise him on how to proceed in his academic career while shedding light on the allied health offerings our department has asked us to promote to males. Our response included an examination of our advisee's perceived gender, social-class, and race/ethnicity and how these areas intersected and influenced his decision(s).

Over SIU’s winter break, we met to discuss strategies, divide up the work, record video, create slides for our presentation, and record the narration for those slides. Brian was the camera guy - he’s got all the fancy equipment. Jac knew how to edit everything, record the audio, and assemble all the “ingredients” of our submission.

We uploaded our submission to YouTube and waited. When we received the results and the judges’ critique, we laughed. We laughed in the "we-didn’t-do-so-well" way people laugh. The feedback we received was helpful and it provided a great learning opportunity for us.

None of us have formal advising experience, have much interaction with non-traditionally aged students, nor work at a community college and understand the nuances of higher education in this realm. These deficiencies in our knowledge were highlighted. Also, being fresh (1-3 years) out of graduate school, our response was theory-heavy. The judges were hoping for some more practical ways we could assist our advisee.

After receiving our feedback, we were at lunch with our Director of University Housing, Dr. Jon Shaffer, and had a chance to discuss the results with him. He reiterated the sentiments of the judges: while theory is important and should provide a foundation for our work, there still need to be pragmatic applications of that theory with how we operate as professionals day-to-day. In short, our response for the case study was much too cerebral.

In the end, it was a great exercise. We continued to develop ourselves as student affairs professionals. We bonded before, during, and after the competition. We role modeled professional development for our College Student Personnel graduate students, which helped us push them into entering a case study of their own shortly after the semester started.