The PandaPro Life

  A blog about my experience as a university housing paraprofessional, specifically a Resident Advisor. I also love pandas. Hope you enjoy reading what I have to say. 

[thepandaprolife]

When only 1 resident comes to your program...

A few weeks into the semester, I scheduled a lounge decorating program for my residents because they requested it. BUT, none of those residents came to the program! I even had candy there as an incentive! A few residents came by and took candy, but only 1 resident stayed to actually decorate with me. Not much decorating can really be done to a lounge with 3 completely blank walls when there are only two people working on it. However, I was able to have a really great conversation with this resident (who also happened to be having a roommate conflict), and we stayed up decorating until 1 AM.

What I’m really happy about is the fact that this resident told me how much she loved our community, how she was happy I was helping her with her roommate conflict, and that she ultimately didn’t want to move out anymore. I was so glad she said that because I was feeling very stressed at the time (I was dealing with multiple roommate conflicts and that banana vandalism incident), and she made me feel appreciated. Even though everything else was going awry, at least one resident recognized my efforts. And I think that’s really what matters. As long as I’ve made a difference in just one person’s life, and helped that person get to where they want to be, I’ll be happy.

[thepandaprolife]

So one of my residents thought it would be funny to hang a banana from the ceiling...

I placed an Amnesty Box out on my floor for my residents to turn in items that are not allowed in the reshall, or any items they may have “borrowed” from the dining hall. I came back from class one day to find this banana hanging from the ceiling with a sign, and I immediately took it all down. But, seeing this "prank” triggered emotions of anger, worry, and anxiety in me. It was very difficult to process all of these emotions because I felt targeted and disrespected by the resident (I was able to easily determine who it was). I was also worried by how my other residents would feel seeing this in the hallway. After having conversation with our Multicultural Advocate (MA) and my Resident Director (RD) about triggers and Intent vs. Impact, I was finally able to “carefront” the resident about this situation. I hope my resident was able to learn from this situation. I certainly did.

[thepandaprolife]

Airplane Door Decs

These were my Fall semester door decs! They went along with our LLC’s “Defying Gravity” theme, and also went along with my Famous Female Pilots bulletin board!  

[thepandaprolife]

Big Hero 6 Quiet Hours Sign!

I loved the movie Big Hero 6 so much, that I had to incorporate it into my floor somehow!! The idea for a quiet hours sign was pretty simple. It just took me a long time to make because I cut & pasted each individual letter in the Big Hero 6 movie font to form the words at the top. I still don’t know how to download fonts to use on MS Word. :/

[thepandaprolife]

Frozen Don’t Slam Doors Sign

My residents have been letting their doors slam shut lately, and it has been very disruptive (and getting on my nerves). So, I made these signs and hung them up all over my floor! I’m also planning to send out and email to remind them to be mindful when closing their doors. I just hope they get the message.

[thepandaprolife]

Check Your Boobies!

My October board about Breast Cancer Awareness

[thepandaprolife]

The Roommate Theory

My September Board about living with a roommate! I also paired this bulletin board with a “How well do you know your Roommate?” game for my September program.

[thepandaprolife]

“There’s a bat in the building?!?!” (Part 2)

So I ended up waiting an entire hour for pest control to arrive. What was cool, though, was that fact that pest control consisted of these two women who arrived with a huge net on a long stick. They arrived at 4 AM (sorry, I was tired) and asked me to show them where the bat was. At first none of us saw the bat, until I noticed that it was hanging upside-down from one of the curtains. Then the women opened the door and moved in. 

BAM! 

In one swoop, the first woman captured the bat in the net. With the bat now on the ground and captured in the net, the second woman (who had thick gloves on) picked up the bat, and placed it inside a plastic animal container. After they brought the bat out of the lounge, they let me look at it and take this picture, haha. All of this happened in less than 5 mins. Talk about bad-ass.

As you can see the bat is pretty small. Its body was only about 5 to 6 inches long, and it didn’t really have any eyes. The bat looks cute in this picture, but before that it was screeching and baring its teeth at us, which made it seem pretty scary despite its small size. The whole ordeal ended around 4:10 am, but guess who had to write the report? That’s right-- ME. Anyways, I was able to finish writing the report and go to sleep around 4:30 am. Unfortunately, I didn’t wake up in time for my 9 am the next day. Oh, well.

[thepandaprolife]

“There’s a bat in the building?!?!” (Part 1)

My first night of duty was on a Tuesday night. I guess I wasn’t expecting too much to happen on a weeknight. Little did I know that I would be called three times after midnight to handle situations. Two of the situations were just noise issues. But at 3:00 AM, I got this phone call:

Me: *a bit groggy after being woken up* “Hello?”

Front desk: “Hi, Kaylin. We have a resident here saying they saw a bat in the lounge.”

Me: “...A bat? Like the kind that flies?” 

Front desk: “Yes. Can you come down here and take a look?”

Me: “Okay.” 

I went downstairs to the main lounge, and I didn’t even have to go inside to see the bat flying around the room. I immediately checked to see if anyone was inside (no one was, maybe since it was 3 AM), and I trapped the bat inside by shutting all the doors. Then I called the RD on duty, who called pest control. I was told that I would have to wait for pest control to arrive in 20 mins, and lead them to the bat. I filmed the above video of the bat through the lounge door window while waiting... 

[thepandaprolife]

RA on Duty!

These photos are from my very first night of duty, which was quite a long night (and worth its own post). You can tell that I was super excited to be in uniform and do my rounds, haha! The front of the shirt says “I help make the halls a home.” I quite like our staff uniforms. They’re official-looking but not too formal, and they’re not off-putting to residents while still identifying us as staff.

[thepandaprolife]

A couple pictures of my door and my “Where’s my RA?” sign. 

I really love all of the door decs that I got from my staff because they cheer me up every time I come back! Since my room is at the end of the north hallway on my floor (my floor has two hallways), I put a big “RA” sign with an arrow so that my residents knew where my room was at the beginning of the year. Below that sign are a few others, including our university’s inclusivity statement. I plan to keep all of these up year-round.    

[thepandaprolife]

Women Who Defied Gravity

This is my second bulletin board. I was going along with this year’s theme for my LLC, which is “Defy Gravity.” I knew from the beginning that I wanted to create a bulletin board about inspirational women because I wanted my residents to see that women also have great achievements. 

I had seen an article online about famous female pilots, so I chose airplanes as my theme for door decs and for this bulletin board. Because I had already read the article, it was easy for me to find women to put on this board. The only difficulty was summarizing the already long biographies of these women so that it would be digestible for my residents. 

Unfortunately, I found out (after asking my residents) that not many of them had read this board due to its placement. All my bulletin boards are located inside the communal bathroom on my floor, and this particular board was across from the shower stalls. One of my other bulletin boards is situated right above the hand dryer, and my residents told me they read that board more often because they have to stand there while their hands are drying. So I learned to place important boards (or boards with a lot of information) above the hand dryer.

TL;DR These women are bad-ass, and put your flyers and bulletin boards by the hand dryer.

[thepandaprolife]

Defying Gravity

So because my floor is part of a Living-Learning Community (LLC), my decorations and boards pretty much had to follow a predetermined theme. The theme for this year was “Defy Gravity.” I was quite pleased to hear about this theme because it left a lot of room for me to improvise, as the theme could be interpreted in different ways. 

When I was interpreting the theme, I thought of many different things that defied gravity (like rockets, balloons, airplanes, etc.) and how I would represent them. I ended up choosing this hot-air balloon theme for my board/wall display which is the first thing you would see if you got off the elevator on my floor. 

It is very simple, and I am able to post other signs and posters to it because I left a lot of space in the “sky.” The only thing I found difficult about this board was actually getting it up because, as you can see in the photo, the board stretches from the floor all the way to the ceiling. I am not a very tall person, so I actually had to get a step ladder to help me reach the top to staple the paper! I’m sure it would have been a funny sight to see me struggle to get this board up; I practically had to defy gravity myself to do it!

[thepandaprolife]

Parapros prepping for halls to open be like

[thepandaprolife]

Meet Your RA!

My very first bulletin board! I had a lot of fun looking for different photos to share a little bit about who I am. The layout with the string was improvised because the board was smaller than I expected (23″ x 35″), and I hadn’t taken that into account before printing things out. But I think it worked out well for the finished product! I learned to plan my layouts for future bulletin boards.

[thepandaprolife]

Hello!

My name is Kaylin (my preferred pronouns are she/her/hers), I am a junior studying engineering, and this is my first year as an RA at my university. I work in a residence hall that has 12 floors, each floor is single-gendered, and there is one RA for each floor. There are 54 residents on my floor, and my floor is also part of a living-learning community for women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.

I really want to share my experiences here because I think the community that currently exists online is so helpful and supportive, especially for people who are just starting parapro positions. That, and the memes and gifs about the parapro life are hilarious LOL. I use the term “parapro” because I want to be inclusive of other housing paraprofessional positions, such as Multicultural Advocates and Program Advisors (these are the other two positions available at my university, but I’m sure other universities have different positions).

I’ve found that it’s so difficult to share my experiences with friends who aren’t parapros because I end up sounding like I’m complaining about my job. Sure, I’ve encountered many stressful situations in my position, but I still love what I do. There is so much more to being a parapro than documenting incidents and creating programs, and I want to share that here.

This blog is not only for the other parapros out there; it’s also for those interested in parapro positions, or those who are just curious about what we do. I want to use this blog to shed light on the growth that students (including parapros!) experience during college. There is so much that goes on during these years, and I really want to share what I have learned. I hope you will enjoy my blog, and thanks for reading!