“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I learn.”

-Benjamin Franklin.

This quote is one of the pins I posted on our Pinterest board, which summarizes what we have been learning throughout this quarter. For our students’ learning and our professional learning, we need to be fully engaged, challenged, and be able to connect our learning to previous knowledge. Below are my 4 key reflections on our CSL 490 class:

• Know your colleagues within your office, university, and regionally/nationally: First, you need to build relationships within your office to collaborate with, learn from, and create a peaceful work environment. As you grow in your knowledge and confidence, it is easy to focus on your work. But you also need to step back and remember the student is multi-faceted and will need help in areas that you lack expertise. The network you develop will introduce you to people who you can direct your students to and models to the students that you do not know everything and that is ok to ask for help. Step back further and look at how your office and how you individually are contributing to institutional mission. Finally, as new classes of students enter the university, change how you work with students, gain new skills and knowledge, and be creative. Avoid getting too comfortable, remember your mission on campus, and make sure that you are still growing as a person. I am amazed at the amount of resources our class posted on Pinterest and it shows that we have so much to learn, but we are all learning together and learning from each other.

• Personal development: As an aspiring career counselor, I expect many of my students to be only concerned about finding a job, but I will now ask more to get to know the student. What are the your hopes and dreams? What clubs and hobbies do they enjoy? What do you enjoy learning about? What are you passionate about? Can any of these answers connect to a future career? I hope that my students understand that yes academics are important for a future job, but there are numerous ways their passions and interests can help them in their careers. If I work with specific majors, I want to work directly with the faculty to see how we can work together towards the goal of student learning.
• Continue the conversation: As a professionals, I think we need to continue having difficult conversations about multiculturalism, institutional changes, student learning, and more. We need to encourage and challenge each other to be open to these conversations because it is easy to become complacent and avoid these conversations at all costs, but again we are modeling for our students how to have these difficult conversations. As student affairs professionals, we still have the opportunity to put our words into action and encourage our students to do the same in meaningful ways where they learn how to understand different perspectives, critically think about research, learn how to communicate their opinions respectfully, and more. On our Pinterest we posted a lot of resources and infographics that I think are all great conversation starters and also help us develop our multicultural competence.  
• Self-care: We talk about self-care a lot in our counseling courses and I hope that we do not forget about self-care as we enter the field. I think it is more than just work-life balance, but finding satisfaction in all that you do. If you find yourself not caring, ask yourself why? Or seek individual counseling to explore those feelings, join a support group for SA, find a mentor, and be committed to self-care.

As I finish up this post, I see a theme of student affair professionals modeling behaviors for their students. We may want our students to develop in multiple ways, but we must also apply the same developmental learning in our lives. I think that is why I love student affairs because I have the opportunity to see the potential of growth in our first year students, to celebrate the progress they made when they graduate, and to grow professionally and personally alongside my students and colleagues.