I am going to let you in on a little secret. Your RA loves you and truly wants to be your friend. We are not RAs because of the pay. Someone couldn't pay us enough to deal with the amount of stuff we decided to deal with. As RAs, we have to deal with the mental and physical health of the students who are put under our care. Before school even starts, we spend two weeks training to know the signs of things like suicide, bulimia, anorexia and depression. We train to also help in those situations, so that we may help our students through those dark times. We also learn when we need to seek help for our students, and even ourselves.
When we find someone is breaking a rule and we have to write them up, it tears us up. We know that you are all adults and we want to treat you like adults, but there are times when we have no other choice but to do our job. If you are kind to us and understand that we are trying to do our jobs, then we will try our hardest to make sure there is a soft punishment or even no punishment. If you are breaking a rule you know the school enforces a lot, mine is visation, don't yell at us for getting caught. You are the one to blame for the rule being broken. We know that most students are more angry at getting caught then actually breaking the rule. If you just admit that you broke the rule, and don't get mad and yell at us, then things would be easier.
We plan each of our events with our students in mind. We have been planing most of them before school even started. It hurts when only our own roommates show up. What makes us really mad is when our students ask for more events, but we had an event every month and no one showed up. Most of the events come out of our own budget. I spent last semester with no budget from the school, and I had multiple events that no one showed up to. So it makes no sense to ask for more events that most students won't come to. So as an RA, please go to the events! It makes us happy to see our hard work pay off.
We want to be there for each one of you, but we are human, and we have bad days, too. We spend more time worrying about each of our students then we do worrying about ourselves. In doing that we have the tendency to run ourselves ragged. We don't do this for the money, we do it because we love helping people. Most RAs would trade anything to know that we helped as least one person during our time as RAs.
Being RAs means we give a part of ourselves to our student if they want it or not. We want to be your friends, and we would want to be even if we were asked to do it for free, because we love all of our students.
