“Freind-ish”: Residents’ friend or advisor?

Being an advisor is all about balance. RAs and their apartment counterparts, Community Advisors (CAs), learn this almost immediately on the job. Should we get seven hours of sleep or knock out a few program evaluations? Should we start our week-in-review or chemistry first? Or, possibly most important, should we be our resident’s friends? Or should we maintain the authoritative facade of a stone-cold advisor? Is there really any one right answer?

During advisor training, advisors are told that one of the most important things they can do is become close to their residents. This makes the job so much easier in everything from programming to warnings to documentations. But they learned this comes with necessary limitations, and advisors must sit somewhere in the middle of being an advisor and a friend.

Cerro Vista CAs Katlyn Roobian and Bodin Rojanachaichanin work behind the Cerro Vista Community Center's front desk. The two take different approaches to balancing their duties as an RA with friendships that develop with residents.

Child development junior Katlyn Roobian is a CA in the Cerro Vista apartments. She said she worked hard in the beginning of the year to remain fair and carefully toed the line between a friend and an advisor.

“It’s really important to remember the balance,” she said, “and it’s really difficult sometimes because there’s not necessarily a wall, but there’s definitely a line where you can be friendly but you can’t be friends.”

Roobian said she has succeeded in creating a balance between the two, which, in her eyes, should be a goal of all advisors.

But for mechanical engineering sophomore Bodin Rojanachaichanin, who also works on Roobian’s Cerro Vista staff, it is not always necessary to perfectly balance the two positions. Roobian described Rojanachaichanin as, “the nice one.”

“I think for me I tend to be more friend-ish toward them,” he said. “So around me they tend to be more comfortable around me.”

Rojanachaichanin does, however, see the possible downfalls of being too close of friends with his residents.

“That can be a problem when they talk about things they would just say to friends, whereas you can’t say that to an advisor,” he said. “In a documentation situation you have to be more one sided and be the authority because you have to take control of that situation and not let them walk all over you.”

Community advisor Luke Thompson, center, walks to the ridge behind Trinity Hall to hike to the "P". The fact that the majority of Thompson's friends live in PCV, where he is an advisor, presents a unique challenge for him.

Poly Canyon Village (PCV) CA and biomedical engineering sophomore Luke Thompson also thinks he falls more on the side of friend than advisor. But this is for a somewhat different reason than Rojanachaichanin.

Thompson’s residents are actually his friends.

“Me as a sophomore, the majority of my friends do live in PCV,” Thompson said. “So if I want to hang out, I’m not going to hang out off campus. I’m going to be continuing to hang out in PCV and being seen by my residents. ”

Thompson says he’s lucky that his floor hasn’t had any disciplinary problems yet, since his friendship with the residents could be problematic. Still, though, he believes his residents would respect him as an authority figure.

” You need to be like the friends-ish thing,” he said. “This is good because hopefully you have that trust with your residents where they can come to you if they have potentially big issues but you have to maintain your authoritative figurehead. ”

“I want to build relationships with them so they’re more respectful of me if I have to be authoritative with them.” – Luke Thompson, Poly Canyon Village advisor

Business administration freshman Simon Manson said his RA in Yosemite Hall is more of a friend to him. Not entirely surprising, he prefers it this way.

“She acts very relaxed and she does her job but she’s not very stiff,” Manson said. “Like if she ever asks us to keep it down it’s not really stern, it’s more like ‘Oh if you guys could just keep it down, you know, it’s 10:15 so if you guys could just keep it down or take it to someone’s room that’d be awesome.’ Instead of ‘You guys need to shut up.’”

His RA, parks, recreation and tourism administration junior Chelsea Pugh, said that by maintaining this positive relationship it helps her as an advisor. Residents like Manson, she said, appreciate the effort she puts into being their advisor because of this and respect her for it.

“I think being friendly toward your residents and being open to discussing topics with them that friends would be able to discuss, you also gain respect with them as being something other than authority figure,” she said. “It just adds balance to your role.”