This job search has been like a job in itself and I often wonder if I am being comprehensive enough in my search. While I tend to think I know what I am looking for, as I go through the search it seems as if my interests begin to change and that what I think I want to do now may be very different from what I wanted to do months and even years ago. So when I say comprehensive, I question if I am leaving room to search for the areas that I may like to explore as well as the areas that I believe I have always wanted to be a part of .
For the longest, all I have ever known is that I want to work in multicultural services working specifically with racially and ethnically underrepresented students in their holistic development within their higher educational career. This was most likely influenced by my experiences up until graduate school including my previous job where I advised student organizations that focused on cultural and social justice issues. In addition to that, as an undergrad my academic and co-curricular activities were focused on the experiences of marginalized people and a little on the understanding of privilege.
During my graduate program I really did not work much with racially or ethnically marginalized groups as most of the students I worked with were White students. This was mainly due to the positions I held and not because it was a predominantly White institution (as my full time experience was at a predominantly White institution as well). My positions included Alcohol and Drug Education Programs (ADEP) and Residence Education. I rarely ever worked with students of color in ADEP and if we review the strong correlation between SES and race, being that I was the hall director for one of the most expensive residence halls to live in, I literally could probably count on both hands the number of students of color in my building.
I believe it was due to the experiences I had with racial majority students that I began to like the challenge of understanding their perspectives and figuring out how I could create cross cultural communication experiences between them and racially underrepresented students. I got accustomed to sharing my own experiences as a racially underrepresented student. I think I gained a better understanding in the last couple of years that many White students do not understand the experiences of racially marginalized groups because they are not taught to. We as a society within our many institutions, systemically minimize and naturalize the experiences of underrepresented people so that when it comes to building relationships the real lived experiences are not easily understood, which often causes a lot of strife between communities. It is this greater understanding along with many others that I believe my desire to work specifically with racially disenfranchised student populations has broadened and now I would like to work with creating greater modes of communication between the privileged and the oppressed.
In my collective experiences I have also grown to understand the connection between academia and student affairs. Before I probably would have said things like, “student affairs is the other side of academics,” but now I look at it more as a component of education where academics is also a component. I am intrigued with the maturity that has taken place in how I think about my profession and how I am better able to articulate its importance.
I look at a holistic education as a three pronged instrument, by where we learn through cognitive, affective and kinesthetic means. Cognitive learning is the ability to stimulate our brains intellectually. Affective learning I believe is the learning that takes place when the material you’ve taken in cognitively is personally related to you and emotionally affects you and creates your mind. Kinesthetic learning is the hands-on learning where a student has the opportunity to put what they have intellectually learned and emotionally connected to actually living it. I believe both academia and student affairs work together to create this three pronged learning, or holistic education. For example, one of the reasons I chose to go into Africana Studies and Sociology was because I was learning things that really connected to my lived experiences, which I understood through the activities I did under a student affairs guidance, which also gave me the opportunity to apply what I was learning in my daily living through my actions, language and relationships with others.
This kind of understanding of holistic learning along with a practicum experience I had really sparked my interest in academic advising because I saw it as an opportunity to support holistic education from a perspective I was not normally used to engaging in. It is now one of the areas that I am exploring as conduct my job search, which is something I never thought I would ever be interested in.
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