April is being...well, April

It's 1 am and I'm still in the office. Yup, my life is pathetic. But it was just one of those days. It started off with a "thrilling" session of state mandated sexual harassment training - oh those "fun" things we get to do our first year. I really think ResLife should be exempt from some of those trainings - I mean, we had to do a diversity one that was basically a simplified version of what we train our RAs on. But hey, it's state mandated, so what can you do...

The day continued with a "lovely" but oh-so-pointless meeting with one of my learning community partners, who is leaving by the end of the year - so why are we still meeting to talk about things that we both know we'll never agree on. Today's topic was our learning communities lounge. Our students ahve been arguing about whether it's a quiet study lounge or a lounge for socializing. They asked me to make a decision. I told them I wouldn't but we could have a meeting to talk about it. Yeah, it would have been easier to just send out an e-mail and say, "This is the rule" but let's be honest, how developmental would that be? And the truth is, there is no rule. The lounge "used" be more of a social space. We do a decent number of programs in there. But when there aren't programs, I really don't have a preference what the lounge is used for - that's up to the students, so they need to come up with a decision.
The underlying tension is that there's one learning community that used to have the lounge to itself for the past few years. This year, they have to share with another learning community, one that's a lot smaller. I've been fighting the students' sense of entitlement - and honestly, it actually hasn't been too difficult and many of them have agreed that they should be sharing that lounge - but some of our learning community partners are worse than the students when it comes to their sense of entitlement. So once today the response I got was that I should be telling those other learning community students that this isn't a quiet study lounge and that they can't change the purpose of the lounge. Sigh.

After that, I had several student meetings, back to back. "Fortunately" I got stood up by two students, who had a conduct meeting with me (who also told me last week that they would do "anything" if I just dropped the case...hmmm, not showing up to your meeting isn't exactly doing "anything") - but that at least gave me the time to get ready for my evening of meetings. That evening started with a get-together with the staff for next year, which was really fun. We only got through about half of my agenda, but they had some good questions and we had a good conversation. That was followed by a student organization meeting and then the "epic" lounge meeting - where only representatives from one side showed up, so it was a pretty basic discussion. But it was still 10:30 pm by the time I made it back to the office, which was really the first time during the day I had to read and respond to e-mails, get some things organized and attempt to figure out how I will make it through tomorrow (particularly tomorrow from 7:30-8 pm because I'm supposed to be at three places at once for that half hour).

But hey, we're more than half-way through April and May...well, May will be a different story. ;)