Center Coordinators Feature Story

Ask an OU Housing Center Coordinator (CC, for short) what their job entails and you will get a different answer every time.

Rodney Bates, the Center Coordinator for Adams Center described his job as, "The jack-of-all-trades position." He continued, "If you think about life.... you have to deal with your family... work.. social aspects.... relationships... money... your spiritual (life)... your health... Okay, throw a CC title on it and then that's what we do with students. It is hard to define it because we deal with everything."

The CCs do not have much help in trying to figure out how to deal with everything. It is mainly up to them to determine how to deal with the needs of each student.

"There is no handbook for life, we don't necessarily have a handbook for what we do, said Bates. "We have to be all things to everyone."

While the coordinators have many tasks that are not well outlined they do have the job of being the lead disciplinarians for the students. But this is the last thing the leaders of the centers want to be known for.

Rarely do they think of themselves as being rule enforcers; they all thought of the moments they have with the students as times to help them grow. They said when students receive an alcohol or drug citation, or when they have a specific citation three times, each person is brought into the office to be helped, not to be condemned.

"I think we all like to take those opportunities as teaching moments," Elisa Smith, the Cate Center Coordinator said.

Smith wants the students to think about what they have done and figure out how they could have done those things differently.

She explained further, "They are on their own for the first time, how can we help them transition through this?"

Bates described his relationship with the students as one of a mentor.

"When they're coming to talk with me it's to get advice. It's 'What do you recommend?' More of a mentor aspect," Bates said. "I understand that they see me as a professional and they may not feel as comfortable with (a casual relationship). I'll take the mentor relationship, or aspect of it."

The Walker Center Coordinator, Erin Simpson takes a similar route when it comes to her interaction with the students in Walker. She enjoys turning the discipline contacts she has to friendships in the end. Simpson enjoys seeing a student in the cafeteria that she had to previously discipline and letting them know that she has not judged them for whatever crime they committed. She wants to be known for more than just the disciplinary force in the dorms.

While talking with the Center Coordinators, they explained that when the citations were most heavily handed out was during times of great stress on the students.

"When it gets crunch time in terms of academics you always see a little bit of rise in citations in general. That is because kids are stressed out, staying up all night, then trying to relax in ways that bend the policies, break them sometimes." SImpson said.

However, Rodney Bates finds the issues he deals with in Adams to be at an even deeper level. He said the numbers point to him dealing with students with alcohol and drug citations. But those citations are not the main issue.

"Alcohol is the surface of the majority of what I meet about. But it's really that they make poor choices," Bates said. "Even though alcohol is the reason you're in the room (CCs office), the reason you're in this chair is because you made a poor decision to drink alcohol. So let's talk about your decision making."

Bates, along with the rest of the CCs are looking to adapt to the ever changing landscape of the average college student to help each of them make good decisions.

The coordinators do not only give talks to students for serious citations, they also lead groups of undergraduate students and graduate students to help make their job slightly less chaotic.

The CCs each have two resident directors (or RDs) assigned to them to help deal with citations in the dorms and to help organize events within the dorms. Each resident director has their daily jobs to deal with, all while dealing with being a graduate student at OU.

Both directors, as well as the coordinator helps lead resident advisors or RAs.

They explained that sometimes they make things up as they go, but the book never gets smaller and they have to have the drive to be everything to every student that needs their leadership for those teaching moments.