Season 1 - Episode 4

Good day, everyone. This is Anthony Scott, and I want to welcome you to Foundations. Foundations is presented to you by Virginia Tech Student Affairs. And it's a forum for us to sit down with friends and talk about what's going on in student affairs, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, and how it affects our students and our employees here at Virginia Tech. So today, I want to just let you know that we have two very exciting guests with us here today, and I'll let them introduce- introduce themselves. Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. I'm Chris Wise, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and with responsibility for the health and wellbeing areas of the institution. Hey, good afternoon. Thanking Anthony for having us. My name is James Bridgeforth and I serve as the Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs and ExperienceVT. I want to thank you both for being here. We want to have a very important discussion today about residential wellbeing. And I'll start off by asking you what is residential wellbeing? Well, that's a good question, Anthony. It's something that we have begun to kind of innovate from the former Housing and Residence Life Office, and it is based around trying to give our students a foundation, interestingly enough, of of wellbeing. And during their first year when they live on campus and the opportunity to develop a foundation to set them up for student success. So we think there's a couple of key components of a student's life that will make them complete and whole in addition to their academic endeavors. And some of those things are things like ExperienceVT, things like wellbeing, things like inclusion of belonging. And so residential wellbeing is our effort to tie all of those things into a first year experience. If you will, for students while they're living on campus. And James, I know you have a long history with the residential housing model that's traditionally used in higher education. Why? Why is something like this needed? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good question and it's timely. First, I think what Virginia Tech is doing, what we're doing with the residential wellbeing model, is really eons ahead of where I think a lot of traditional places are. That's important because so much of our history has been about housing students and putting them in a facility and they're good, they're in a bed and they're making some friends. But in this, this world of post-COVID, and when we see students coming from all different types of backgrounds and all different types of challenges, it's important that we create a model of residential wellness. So not that they just live somewhere and they make friends and programs, but they live in a place where they can really become who they are designed to be. And we'll probably get into this. But the unique thing about this residential wellbeing model is this just not saying, "Hey, be well.". It is designed around this co-curricular idea. The students would really develop what we call this "hope thinking", and it is this idea of strengths, goals, pathways and agency. And so hopefully we'll get into that some. But this will be groundbreaking and I believe that once we get this off the ground and build it, it's going to make a monumental change for our students, for our parents. And also I think it's going to revolutionize what we have known in the past student affairs. So and this launches when? This fall. So launch in Fall 2022 and this process will be iterative, iterative and that, you know, we're going to continue to build it and build it and really try to develop it. So we're not expecting for day one for it to be perfect. Right. But we're expecting it to be something that is meaningful to students and something that they can begin to really unpack who they are, who they want to be. And so we'll continue to build it. We're calling this more of a 1.0 model, I think. But I think in the in the end, even the beginning, it's going to be a beautiful rendition of what students can experience living on campus at a at a land grant global institution like Virginia Tech. Chris, I wanted to take a step back because I know you were instrumental in what all of the student support that was given during the COVID period that those two years. Can you can you tell us about what you saw and how this new model will positively affect the students? Sure. Well, I think one of the things that we saw in COVID, and we actually had begun to see this prior to COVID, is that many of our students are probably not socialized at rates that individuals once were. There's a lot of reasons why that might be, but we were already on kind of a trajectory, a trajectory that students were probably not making friends as easily and as quickly as they might have, meeting new people, if you will, and just, you know, having the experiences that we hope that students would have on a campus like Virginia Tech, COVID really kind of rocket ship that even higher, because basically for all of us, you know, we were kind of asked to stay within ourselves, within the community that we knew to protect ourselves and to protect our, you know, the public and so many of our students and the opportunities that they have on a college campus were taken away. And if you think about even our students who aren't here yet or who just got here this year, their high school experience was affected in that way as well. Many of their sports teams, their bands or their organizations didn't function for a year or two. And so oftentimes those are folks that people might really have really great connections with and they lost those. And so you already had this kind of almost isolation and loneliness kind of problem that had began in in higher ed a little bit. Then you had COVID for two years, which, you know, again, exasperated that to a higher level and so now coming out of it, what we found is our students are very, very anxious to get back to those things. But getting back to those things may again still not provide what we want students to get from a belonging place. You know, you hear a lot of people here talk about Virginia Tech, this is home and all those kinds of things. And for many, that comes naturally, but for many it doesn't. And certainly when COVID was was, you know, in its prime, I'm not sure very many people thought of this as home. The students who wanted to be active were told they couldn't. And so they didn't feel comfortable here. The students who were maybe more concerned and more isolated to protect themselves or even more isolated and didn't feel welcome here. And so, you know, it did have a major effect on it. But I do think it's important to note that we were probably already on this kind of path to trying to figure out something new before COVID. COVID happened, probably at an ideal time to begin to do things new. And this is something that's drastically new. But we were probably headed in this direction even prior to Covid. Well, Chris, I know that you supervise the areas of Schiffert Health Center and Cook Counseling and I know all the heavy lifting that your areas did. And I just personally want to thank you for that that work, because I think you've really gotten us to where we are in enabling us to take this new venture. So that said, James, looking at our our six areas of wellbeing which are emotional health, financial security purpose, physical health, social wellbeing and the last being community connections. You you started off talking a little bit about that, and I want to give you sort of a scenario. It's fall of 2022 August. The students are coming here on campus and are going into the residential areas. What what do you think that student is going to experience? When we talk about community connections? Well, I think they're going to experience a lot you know, it's so many institutions and probably us. This past year you could walk into a residence hall, go right to your room, not meet a person this model is very different. And you're going to automatically be in a small group of people. Right. Who want to know your name and get to know you and in in in in an emotional intellectual, intimate kind of way. Right. Will they know who you are, your name, which you like to do? You're going to have really three types of mentors for you. One of those mentors is going to be all about how you connect to wellness in itself. And that can be in my mind, it could be anything. It could be spiritual, it could be financial, it could be social. It could be academic. Then you'll have someone who's working with you, who's helping you to develop this idea of inclusion and belonging that is so huge. Because in order for this to be home, there's a big slogan that Chris just said it on the stadium that says, "This Is Home". You have to feel your included and you belong. And so you'll have some peer mentor it's going to help you think about what that means. And what that means to us at Virginia Tech is not that you have to change who you are. It means that you get to explore who you are and we get to explore that with you very different than you trying to fit in. We don't want you to fit in. We want you to be you. And so that's another kind of connection. And then the third kind of connection, this idea of you the student getting to customize your experience, and that is what ExperienceVT is about. So our student affairs, you know, our student affairs unit and our university is so different than some of the others because most places you go, they say you take these courses, you do these things and you're successful. That's not what we're doing. We're saying as a part of this Residential Well-being model and as a part of student affairs, we measure our success by the success of our students. So when you talk about coming in the front doors of residence hall in August, we hope and we believe there'll be people right away connecting with you, getting to know you. We hope that you're just not. And this is our plan that you're not just not unpacking your your bag and going to dinner with your family and leaving. We hope that you get out the car and you're going to an event right away because our hope and this our hope for the students is that they never experience isolation and loneliness. And so that will be the kind of physical connection that we want them. We say this in a couple of different ways, but we want students to connect to their people. So make friends, connect to their place. that's making organizations. Right. And also that is connecting to physical things at Virginia Tech. If you haven't been to our campus, it is a beautiful, historic campus. And there are so many so many things have imagery like the pylons and the memorial chapel and the drillfield. You know, there are things that that when you leave here, you always remember. So that's part of the place. And then connecting to your possibilities which really is the idea of everything that's happening on campus and how we bring it to you. And that's another difference, right? The difference right now is we want you to find stuff we are trying to find a way of Virginia Tech for the things to find you. And so you're really we want our students to be positively overwhelmed with people, place and possibilities so they can always continue to dig deeper into examine who they are. And so that that will be different. And if we can pull it off and I believe we can, it will be it will change the way higher education works, but it will also change the way that students experience college. And we will see students go from this idea of surviving to thriving, which Chris and his team, they do such a wonderful job of helping us to understand what that means. So, Anthony, I'd love to add something if that's OK. And, you know, I think we all have to understand what we have in the past contributed to where we're at. So this is not an issue that's all about students. I mean, this is an issue about how we've managed, how we've developed, how higher Ed has evolved through the years. We have frequently and I think a lot of places are a place where, as James said, once you get out of the car, we expect you to find us. And he said it very well. What we hope this model does is it allows us to bring what I think are excellent programs, excellent people, excellent organizations, that we have kind of had spaced out around campus. And we're asking our students to walk to them and find them, go on the Web and find them, talk to a friend and find them. This is about, hey, we're going to we're going to bring this to you. And so that might be metaphorically. We're literally going to bring it to you. We're going to do presentations in the residence hall or we're at least going to have students trained in the residence hall that know a lot about what what these programs are so that they can begin to have these conversations, as James said earlier, about what excites you? Who are you? Because I think we have something here for everyone in every kind of every kind of I don't know personality or interest level that somebody might have. But oftentimes students aren't ready to just start walking out and find them that day one day to day three. And so if we can train students really well in this model, the three types of students we're talking about or whatever, then that conversation about we're bringing it to you could be something that happens in your residence hall room, in a lounge in the hallway or whatever, where you quickly learn that, oh, there is this thing that I'm about that I want to be a part of, and we're not asking you to always go find it. We want to make sure our students know that we can bring it to you any time. You don't always have to be out looking for it on your own. So the the idea, the root "dorm" comes from this idea "to sleep". And so when you think about when you think about the kind of model we're making, we don't want students to come to sleep. We want them to live in a vibrant community. Right? And so that's why we go with this this idea of a residence hall. We want you to really have this vibrant life. But, you know, I think the traditional role of the R.A., when it when it when it first began and up through probably the sixties and seventies, it was much earlier than that. But sixties and seventies and even eighties and nineties, you know, this is someone who primarily was like a hall monitor on your floor right? They got to do programs. They got to bring cupcakes. You might give it up if you if you put the smoke alarm down or something like that. Plates and all that. But post 20, ten and maybe even before there's a big emergence of students coming to campus, more medicated, right. Needing that support. We're seeing students come to campus now struggling with mental health more. Now we are seeing things happen around sexual assault. Now that happens and so for an undergraduate student who's here to get their degree, that's a lot. I mean, if you think about it, if you're working with 1 sexual assault case, that's a lot for one person. So imagine them trying to juggle that and we say to them what, you know, everybody's name, their number and how they're doing one report. So when are they going to class? So what we've done here, as we've said, maybe the traditional term of the R.A. is great. But we're innovative and we want to create a new kind of experience. And maybe we need people to do three different things. And the one thing I love about this is we're we're trying to isolate the work so that you're not doing 500 different things. So we're saying this group, we really want you to be wonderful cheerleaders and help students get engaged. We want you to help them figure out what that experience is for them and make campus fun. Right. We told another group, we want you to really help the students determine what what is wellbeing for them. And this is great because before you come to college, you don't really have access to a Rec Center. If you're an athlete, you have a gym. But, you know, it's the first time someone can introduce them to that and healthy eating and what it means to have healthy relationships. And then we're asking other people, people to say, "You belong here. Help us understand more about you and help us bring people to you so that you know this is home for you." So basically, we're trying to take the parts of the people building and put them in hands of our student leaders and take the part of the big difficult things mental health, sexual assault, major crisis to professionals. And I think that is where we're starting. So so that's what I would say. If I'm hearing you right. James, can you explain just talk about identify those three areas because you won't have the traditional R.A. You have what's the student leader? Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, again, I think this is an iterative process. So right now, what we're calling each of them, there are three types. There's a there is a student leader for inclusion and belonging. There's a student leader for wellbeing and a student leader for ExperienceVT. I suspect over the years those those titles will change, but the focus will be the same. Right. And so we're still I think, building the model. So if I can add again, if you think about the current structure of an R.A, they're assigned to a building, they're assigned to a floor, they're assigned to a certain amount of students that fall into that way into that area. And yet they have responsibility for all the things James just said. So now what a student will have instead of having one or a that they primarily go to now, they'll actually have three student leaders that they can go to around different things. And so let's just walk down the road of the case of maybe somebody and there are a don't hit it off and they don't get along. That student could feel isolated in the current environment because they're not sure who next to go to. Now there is someone next to go to now, but that's a lot to figure out on your own. Whereas in this new model, that student would know that they've got three people that have kind of been introduced to them they have different areas that they can help with, but they also this is not a hand off model. Oh, that's a wellbeing issue. That's not me. You need to go find Chris that that's not the way to work. I'm there for you for whatever. But when you get into that special need, then we're going to get you to the person who'll give you that special need. So you're still going to get the response that you get from RAs, now, for certain things, but you're also going to have three people that you can kind of figure out who might be best to deal with. And then those three people will work with even a greater team and professionals to try to figure out, you know, what's the best way to continue to engage students and, you know, and to work with them. We'll also have full time employees in the case management area that will again you know, that's not just a case manager, somebody who might be struggling and need some support. It also might be the case manager for the successful people finding out what makes them successful. So there's a lot of different kind of entry points into a student's life that we think this model does versus the one entry point of one R.A. to one student. Well, Chris, let me ask you this, because James just brought up something. He talked about you. Well, you earlier you talked about isolation and loneliness, and then James talked about mental health and gender. And sexual violence. And we know that these are issues that happens on any and every college campus. But do you see this model being a way of mitigating those instances? Yeah, I do. I you know, James said it best. This will be an iterative model that will evolve. But the reality of it is we believe that the preventative approach to well-being and to the community as opposed to a reactive approach when there's something going on, has the potential to help those things. So a very kind of grand goal that I have is that we will do such a great job working with students when they come in, that even the students themselves will be trained to better look out for each other, to better provide community well-being to each other. It's not something that all the student leaders have responsibility for. We would like for the 10,000 students that actually live on campus to get to a place where they can all kind of be looking out for each other which then begins to help things like sexual violence, which then begins to help things like students that are struggling with mental health. Many students are struggling with many mental health oftentimes it's the amount of things that keep piling on that finally get a student into a place that, you know, they might need counseling, they might need psychiatry, they might need you know, some support if we can have their peers kind of on the lookout because they understand some of these things and can kind of intervene at times early in a student struggles that students got a lot better chance of kind of getting themselves back on track towards whatever it is about their academic life or their social life that they need versus if they sit and kind of have a lot of things pile on. And then we have to react to that. And so, yes, I do believe this model will help with a lot of the kind of more severe cases of issues we see based on the way we're going to try to bring things to people, but also based on the way we're hopefully going to train, you know, at different times and different points in the year, the entire campus, the entire on campus population about how to how to live in a community that's well. So that's a big part of this goal. What what would you say is your vision for that student after they've been here one year? What should be that students take away? What tools do you think those students should have in hand and that has prepared them to be a reflection of your work? Well, one thing that I certainly hope they have is I hope they've got a network of of individuals and I hope it's friends, but certainly of individuals that they have met that they when they move off campus, they will have a network that they'll continuously connect with that we were able to help them build, you know, build as a strong network during their time on campus. But we also hope that, you know, they'll understand what it means to be a sophomore financially on this campus. And if they don't, they'll understand where to go to get those resources that we have a financial wellness group on campus through Hokie Wellness that can support them. And that's not just financial wellness your first year or your senior year going out. There's different avenues of what you need all through your career here. So it would be an ideal situation to me if all of our students, when they leave campus, they at least know all of the resources that are here for them. I would love for some of them to want to connect back and say, Hey, I want to be the next residential student leader because of the value that I got from my student mentor, my student leader mentor. So I would love for many of them to come back. We certainly hopefully involve them in how do we improve this as we continue to move it along. You know, four years into this, every single student on campus, minus maybe a few that are transfers will have gone through this process. And so, you know, I've been asked a lot, well, what about sophomores, juniors and seniors? Well, this is the beginning. And eventually sophomore juniors and seniors will have all been through it. And so your entire campus will now be a resource to each other for different needs that people might have. So those are some of the things that I would hope they would they would take away from them. But one of the biggest one is is a community that they can take a community away from them that they feel like they can come back to at any time and know the support and the resources. And I can take that a little bit a little bit further because I think he said it. And I'm going to try to give give you some additional context because I think this process, it was happening and I don't know that we realized we were building we're having these meetings, these conversations. And I think what we want every student to do and Chris said this is to build a web of connection for each student. And that's going to look different for every student. So, you know, as we started this process, there were two books that we read. One was Relationship With Education with Peter Felton. And this is really that it's about how we help a student come to campus that first year build a relationship rich education, meaning they have a bunch of networks, people They can they can connect with, faculty resources. So they never alone and they can go wherever and come back. And then the other one, Chris, said this class was "Community". Peter Block's "Community" is really the model we hope to do, create the kind of community where everybody's a citizen and everybody's looking out for the citizens. So if you can imagine a place where our students live for a year and they come on this campus and something's going on with you, or they see you sitting by yourself, they know enough about their community to say, Hey, Anthony, I see you're sitting by yourself. You wanna go to dinner? And they don't know you, but they connected you in that way because what they're doing is creating Virginia Tech, the physical campus, if you will, as a community, and everybody is welcome. And so we think and we hope when they leave that first year, they'll have a web and they'll be a part of a community that makes them feel like they have some type of responsibility to continuing what we would all hope our students would have or aspire to be is demonstrate this idea of "Ut Prosim" So Chris, you talked about the height of COVID and everything that you experienced. I really want to hear about your plan to really combat the mental health issues that students are dealing with when it comes to the residential wellbeing model. Yeah. Well, it's a great question. So one of the things we have not talked about, because we've been focusing more on the student leaders is the professional staff that will be involved, you know, with the new residential model. So each one of those student leaders that James identified earlier, there will be a coordinator of those three groups of students. But also in this model there will be five embedded counselors that will live on campus. So they will have apartments on campus and they will be in these communities of 2000 people that we're supporting so that when there is a need for, for example, you know, a crisis comes up on campus. We have a counselor right there. Our current model, our residential employees have done a really good job of responding to it. But what it eventually gets to, if a student needs it, is a is a phone conversation with a counselor and a determination made what the next steps might be for that student in this case, we could probably skip a couple of the steps that it takes to get the student actually in conversation with a counselor by having the counselors living on campus. We also hope the embedded counselors are part of the community, meaning when when each of the communities are doing things, the counselors may be there. So if they're playing some pickup games in the yard together, if they're having a picnic together and whatever the case may be, we want the students to recognize and see a face that they understand is the embedded counselor for their district. And in that moment in time that students can certainly drop in and have conversations with those counselors at any times. And again, that gets back at this whole thing of trying to identify a problem early on, have a good conversation with somebody who's very supportive early on and maybe helping somebody not to get to the next level. Where they might need, you know, a full two or three or four session counseling session with a counselor. These and better counselors can also do that. So that'll be the third part of what they would do. They would certainly be there for ongoing counseling sessions when they need it. But as a rule, we would probably begin to triage people back over to the main counseling center so that the embedded counselors can be there for more of the on call kind of stuff, the relationship building kind of stuff, and the quick drop in conversations. We've had, we've had embedded models in athletics and in some of our colleges and we found that that works really well. Students love to have a counselor as opposed to maybe a faculty member, an advisor, a coach that they can drop in on and talk about things that are something that a professional counselor might can help them in, and then they move along. It's not a full fledged kind of counseling appointment or session that they would do. So we hope that that will again help with students who might be seeking that out on a regular basis, not only 8-5 when our counselors are available but all through the evening and certainly if there's emergencies and through the into the night. Gotcha. And thank you, Chris. And James, you mentioned early about students coming here. Students arriving here and then going into their their area and then going out and doing things. What are they going to be doing? Well, I think it depends on the student and that's the cool thing about what we're trying to accomplish. So I think what you're hitting on is this idea of the student experience. And so here Virginia Tech, we have launched an initiative called ExperienceVT, and ExperienceVT, really at the root of it, is this idea well, we're all students will create a customized experience. So the idea is if you are interested in something that speaks to you, that you can start to craft that. But I want to speak to it a little bit more than that. When we think about ExperienceVT what it really means is that it's a university movement. It's not it's not a it's not a thing. It's an action verb. We want we want people to do this as something that you do - ExperienceVT. And the idea here is that we will help all students identify their strengths. Their strengths are very important. And these are strengths like what are you good at? This your Clifton strengths and your top five Clifton strengths, which are talents. So if something's a talent, you get to develop it. And so we want we want to help to solidify their top five talents, and then we want to coach them to use that as they are really the true emotional and intellectual DNA because it drives everything they do. And what we are trying to do here at Virginia Tech has helped students focus on what they enjoy doing and what they identify that we want to help students clarify their goals. And those goals aren't just academic, it is life goals. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do with your life? What's important to you? And then help connect pathways to students so a good example might be a student at Virginia Tech who shows up here, might identify their strengths and say, well, I think my goal to be a veterinarian, well, our goal, and that is to then help that student create pathways. So we might ask a student, have you met a veterinarian? They might say, well, no. And our job is to say, Well, would you like to? And then not say, Go over here, but we like to link arms with that student and help them meet a new you might take them to the college veterinary science and say, hey, this is, you know, Shaquanda Brown and she wants to be a veterinarian. You're you've been a veterinarian in the past, you know, a professor. How can you connect? And so that's going to create a pathway, but it's also going to create agency because we're teaching students how to go after what they want. And when they can do that, then it's going to inspire hope. And we know that if students can grab this idea of hope for themselves, they can change the world. And that's what we want our students to do. We want them not to leave Virginia Tech and just go do something. We want them to go to Virginia Tech and inspire a transformative transformative world where everybody can live in this place of meeting this idea for them of what striving means. So when I get back to what are they going to do they're going to first identify their strengths. And then in that, we're going to help them do that and they're going to clarify their goals. They're going to help them by linked arms, create pathways to those goals. And help them develop a sense of agency. So by the time they leave that first year, they don't have to feel timid about what they want. They can boldly state what they want and then know how to go after that. If we do that, if we just do that one thing, it will very much change the trajectory of what it means to be a student. Because what we're saying to the students here is that you're a leader. We know you're a leader. Let's help you figure the kind of leader you want to be. And I think that's what makes Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech student affairs very, very very effective for our students. Well, James. I can tell you, you've given me goosebumps because I'm just sitting here imagining what life is like when you have captured all of that after your first year and you're not waiting until you're a junior or a senior to really engage with the campus, but you're prepared, even not after your first year, but during your first year. So I just want to commend you guys, and I wish you great success with this new model. And I'm sure that it will be something that all of higher education will be be eyeing and watching you and just cheering you on. And I'm sure it's going to be successful. So that said, I want to thank everyone. I want to thank the two of you for being here. And I want to thank everyone for listening to this episode of Foundations. And just keep your eyes out for what Virginia Tech is doing with residential wellbeing, because I'm sure this is going to be a model that many institutions will duplicate and replicate. So until next time, this is Anthony Scott, Chief for Inclusion and Belonging at Virginia Tech. I look forward to talking to you next time.