Higher Education & Student Affairs Administration
Past - Present - Future
Internships and Grad Assistantships
Supervised Practice
I have supervised practice experiences from across campus, as well as neighboring institutions.
STUDENT LEADERSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT
During my time with the Student Leadership and Engagement (SLE) Office from August 2018 to May 2019, I had the opportunity to hone many of my professional competencies.
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Leadership
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Law, Policy, & Governance
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Advising & Supporting
My role as a Graduate Assistant in this office was as the Reservation and Events Manager. My main duties were to provide outstanding customer service to people both on campus and off regarding the scheduling of space and policies of usage in the Campbell Student Union at Buffalo State. I had the opportunity to learn about programming from a budgeting and planning perspective for student organizations and USG (student government) throughout my many Event Planning Meetings with some of Buffalo State's largest and smallest student groups. I also had a keen insider view of how policy was created, delineated, and enforced. During all of these meetings, students looked to me for leadership, advising, and support, and providing these students with just that has provided me with the experiential learning that is critical to high-impact practices such as graduate assistantships. I also have worked collaboratively with offices across campus to put on events for departments, and also I've worked very closely with Events Management when we host off-campus vendors. Working with so many different people in this role very much bolstered my confidence as a leader, and I have become much more competent in this area as a direct result of this supervised practice.
CIVIC AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
In the Spring of 2019, I held an Internship role with Civic and Community Engagement. Similar to my GA position with SLE, I worked on many of my professional competencie areas:
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Social Justice and Inclusion
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Student Learning and Development
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Leadership
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Law, Policy, & Governance
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Advising & Supporting
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Organization and Human Resources
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Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
First and foremost, my work at CCE was entirely based around Social Justice and Inclusion. I got into this role after participating on a service-learning Alternative Break trip to Puerto Rico for disaster relief. I took what I learned there and expanded my desire to do more good and to teach other students the importance of high-impact practices like service-learning. As we come together and work as a community, we are able to get much more done than when we work alone.
My involvement with the office grew over the semester. I was an Alternative Break trip Staff Advisor, which truly helped my growth in the areas of Leadership, Advising & Supporting, and also Law, Policy, and Governance. Fortunately for me, I had an incredible group of students to work with and they were both affirming and life changing.
My main task within this office was to collaborate with the Student Civic Leadership Board and the Alternative Break Leadership Board to combine the two into one cohesive unit. This involved drafting new position descriptions, interview protocol, and a rubric to score candidates. This collaboration helped me to become more proficient in many areas, but I think most of all Organizational and Human Resources.
My secondary task was to create a Student Service-Learning Handbook. The intention here was not to recreate the wheel entirely, but to amass information from various sources like CCE's website, orientation materials, etc., into a place where students can have a one-stop shop experience when they are entering into a service-learning course at Buffalo State. While this is an ongoing project, the beginning of it can be seen here. This project is one that I sought out upon meeting with my supervisor so that I would be exposed to more Law, Policy, and Governance work that I have not been involved in throughout my career. This also lends itself to growth in the categories of Leadership, as well as Advising & Supporting.
The Weigel Health Counselling Center
In the Spring 2019 semester, as a little something to do on the side to be even more involved with students, I chose to also serve as a Teaching Assistant for a Peer Mentoring course offered as an elective by a professor from the Counselling Center.
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Social Justice and Inclusion
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Student Learning and Development
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Leadership
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Law, Policy, & Governance
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Advising & Supporting
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Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
The course is offered as a certification course to officially become CAS (Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education) certified as a Peer Educator. Although there were only 3 students in this pilot section, the students were very engaged! I had one other TA experience as an undergraduate student. Both experiences have served as great growth opportunities for me in a variety of professional competencies. I think that the main ones here for me were Leadership, and Advising & Support. I really felt as though I had the opportunity to connect with the students, but also be present as a guide and mentor. As a TA, I was also enlisted for administrative tasks such as coming up with extra credit opportunities, and creating a rubric for the final project.
Events Management
In July of 2019, I took on a new paraprofessional role with Events Management at BSC for about 30 hours a week. The work of this position was very different from my previous work in supervised practice, and was challenging, rewarding, and educational.
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Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
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Law, Policy, and Governance
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Organizational and Human Resources
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Leadership
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Technology
My position with Events Management was 99% dedicated to the implementation of a new campus-wide scheduling software called 25Live Events and Space Management System. The goal with this new technology is to be able to not only improve campus safety and communication, but to also provide data that will be used to assess space and resource utilization for improved planning and allocation. First and foremost, this is a deep foray into the TECH competency. The work I was producing was incredibly technical and it required learning a complex new system essentially overnight.
As the System Administrator, I built out functionality for all modules and created back-end security profiles for all campus constituents. Employing new technologies like this system is something that campuses around the county are working towards ever day in hopes of providing the campus with easier access and less convoluted processes. The end goal in implementing this entirely new campus system is also directly related to the AER competency, and while we in Events Management were/are building out the functionality of the program, this goal is at the forefront of everyone's minds and conversations as we discuss the capturing and reporting of these quantitative measures at meetings with stakeholders across campus.
I continued my growth in the LPG, OHR, and LEAD competencies, as well, as I worked with management and executives to follow best practices from the field while also considering the institution’s specific needs. A large part of my role was consulting with campus stakeholders and assessing their needs and following up with customized design solutions. We did strategic planning on roll-out, training, on-boarding, upkeep & maintenance, and are worked on a cross-functional team to create procedures and protocols around workflow and system usage.
Although this project was challenging, it was incredibly rewarding and also, quite fun! I love a good puzzle, and for me, it is one of the best feelings in the world to figure something out and have that classic light bulb moment!
Hilbert College Office of Student Records
In the summer of 2019, I did a brief internship at Hilbert College. Due to my love for records and Registrar related work, I thought that it would be a fun side project to work on until classes started in the fall. The main competency areas that I work on were:
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Law, Policy, & Governance
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Advising & Supporting
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Organizational and Human Resources
My role was small and focused mostly on processing documents in VA-Once for graduated veterans, and working on creating FERPA resources for faculty. I also sat in with the Advising Coordinator to learn more about how his role ties in closely with the work of the Registrar. I sat at length with the Registrar and talked about her role. I think the biggest benefit I gained from this experience was seeing the difference between large public institutions and a very small private religious affiliated institution, which I felt also contributed to my understanding of how organizational and human resources work at different schools.
UB School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (SEAS)
In August of 2019 in the midst of my Hilbert Internship, my paraprofessional role in Events Management, and fall classes starting, I decided to seek out full-time employment. In November 2019, I was incredibly fortunate to land a role as the Student Affairs Coordinator for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo. I have been able to focus on many of my competency areas since the beginning of my appointment:
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Law, Policy, & Governance
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Advising & Supporting
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Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
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Leadership
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Social Justice and Inclusion
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Technology
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Values, Philosophy, and History
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Student Learning and Development
As the Student Affairs Coordinator for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) my main role is a leadership role that supports student clubs and helps to plan student activities for the school. At face value, these two things tied in greatly to Advising and Supporting, as well as Student Learning and Development. Typically this involves helping clubs with purchases for large-scale projects like BattleBots, Concrete Canoe, Rocketry, Robotics, etc., holding meetings with club presidents, sending out weekly bulletins, and helping out at events. I need to be very up to date on Law, Policy, and Governance as a part of this club support, I also manage multiple school and club financial accounts. It is important for me to what the money is being spent on, where it's coming from, that the projects are safe and sanctioned, and what input campus constituents like the Student Association or the UB Foundation have.
Additionally, I help to plan school-wide events such as Commencement and award ceremonies, as well as multiple smaller-scale events throughout the year, which includes aiding in marketing and communications, and working with partners across campus on programming. My various other duties include managing the scholarship portal, helping where I can with assessment efforts and grievance procedures, and providing general assistance to the Associate Dean for Accreditation and Student Affairs.
