One thing I’ve noticed so far as an RA is the amazing amount of balance required to keep your life healthy. What’s even more amazing to me is the severe lack of training or fore-warning about this need for balance or how to set about dealing with it. Balance is in many forms; you need to find the right balance between being a good RA and being a pedantic RA who is too strict and alienates themselves from the hall. You need the right balance between being being there for your residents and being too close that it inhibits your ability to perform your job properly. You need to find that balance between doing enough of your job, and keeping up with academics. Most of all, you need to find a balance between your hall life, and your life outside of the hall.
Being too strict can often be a tough one, but one I feel I have done well so far. It can be difficult to go from being friendly with residents to pulling them up for something that they have done wrong, without damaging the relationship you have with them. What has worked so far is treating the residents as people, as equals in a way, so that they respect you for you and not because they have to as you are an authority figure. You don’t like to tell off the residents, but when you have to at least they understand that they are in the wrong and that you are doing your job and not just being an asshole. There are so many rules in the hall, and at times you often let little things slide. RA training teaches us that we should use the rules at our discretion where we feel it is appropriate, but this then means there is a huge amount of grey area. This grey area is what keeps you constantly doubting yourself, constantly wondering if you were too strict or should have done something a different way. But this grey area is what keeps you doing your job properly and not getting complacent, in my opinion at least.
We’re told that we should be friends with our residents, but not their buddies. However I think that almost every RA of a first year hall would agree that it is incredibly hard to not form bonds with your residents. You are living with these people all year, eating every meal with them and doing activities with them daily. It’s nearly impossible not to become close. Because of the nature of the job you don’t see your friends as much as before, and because of this you become friends with your floor. You naturally grow fondness for those who would be your friends in “real life” or those who you have an admiration for. You start to have favourites. It’s not allowed, and you pretend that you don’t but inevitably you will always have residents you would prefer to talk to. This is the problem. If you get too close with your residents you get favourites, you become close with them and it makes telling them off that much harder. However if you distance yourself too much then your residents don’t see you, don’t interact with you so you lose any connection there. And that connection is vital.
Being an RA means that your weekends are almost always busy. You have meetings every week, and at least once a week you’re on duty. During this time, realistically you won’t get any study done at all. Uni is a bitch, and sometimes you can’t handle the workload of it. Add on RA responsibilities and it becomes overwhelming, depressing even. There’s no way around it either. If you focus too much on your RA job then you won’t get in enough study, so you’ll not do as well at uni. Focus too much on academics and you alienate yourself from the rest of the RAs and the residents. Either way you’re screwed. Oh, I forgot to mention to try and balance both you lose a shitload of sleep.
The worst though is the balance between the hall and the outside world. I promised myself that I would keep some form of social life once I became an RA because almost every RA always loses it. I didn’t want that to be me, and to a certain extent it hasn’t. But it also kind of has. You lose touch with those who aren’t your very close friends. Those people who you would always be friendly with and do stuff with but who didn’t know a huge amount about you, the “second-tier friends”. It makes you realise who you really want to be close with, and the people that you want around you. You still get invited to things but suddenly there’s a hall activity or event almost every time, or you are on duty. The less you go though, the more you alienate yourself from those friends. And you lose them. And it sucks. But if you spend too much time trying to keep your social circles in tact, you don’t put as much time and effort as you should into your job meaning there is a lack of balance there. Do this and you lose respect from the residents and your RA team. You’re fucked either way.
I quit the sport I had played for 13 years for this job, just so I could have more time to do RA responsibilities and academics. I walked away from the sport that I loved, with the people that made it so fun, all to make finding a balance just that bit easier. This means that I now don’t enjoy anything, I’m not honestly ever happy and only ever fine. But hey, at least I’m able to kind of strike this magical balance nobody ever talks about.
But for some messed-up reason that makes no sense to me at all, I don’t blame the job at all. In all honesty I’ll probably do it again next year.
Life as an RA 