Reflections on My Experience as a RD

As I stepped onto campus here at USF that first time I suppose I had grand visions of deep, thoughtful conversations. You know the kind. Where both parties walk away knowing that their lives will never be the same. I haven’t actually had any life changing conversations yet, if you want to know the truth. If there has been one thing I have learned since I got here it is that students do not like to have those kinds of chats with “total strangers”, such as myself, and neither do I. This only became clearer to me as I tried to pry my way into chats concerning topics such as: purpose in life, intrinsic value in education, or the notion of worldview. It is actually extremely awkward to attempt a conversation like that with someone you have never talked to before except for the occasional “how are you?” or “how was that football game?”

At this point, I suppose that you want to know: Why do you want to have these discussions with students? You see, I have been reading this book. It’s called Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose and Faith. I picked it up because I spend a lot of time reading books in hope that they will make me smart… but it hasn’t happened yet, but if you want to know the truth, I am really crazy about learning. At any rate, I picked up the book thinking that it would help me mentor young adults because my boss told me that I had to do that and that I wasn’t here just to eat at the cafeteria.

In the book, the author, Sharon Daloz Parks, made the following straightforward statement: “Many [young adults] simply have been lured into elite careers before anyone has invited them to consider the deeper questions of purpose and vocation.” Parks goes on to proclaim that young adults must ultimately obtain faith in order to be mentored into full fledged adulthood where they can make educated decisions for themselves. When she started to talk about faith I assumed she was talking about religion. However, she explains that when she refers to faith she is actually talking about making meaning out of the world we are living in. She pointed out that without the ability to make meaning in life we will suffer from confusion, distress, stagnation and ultimately despair.

I couldn’t really understand what she was talking about, so I asked a college buddy of mine named Andy, who is an airline pilot, what he thought she meant. Andy the airline pilot explained it to me this way. He said that it might help me to understand what Parks was talking about by thinking about even the simplest things in life. As an example, Andy asked me to think about the time I spent four months in Greece and how frustrated I felt when I could not understand the language. Andy the airline pilot caused me to realize that this was also true about the most important things in life. He showed me the place in Parks’ book where she claims that “human beings, either unconsciously or consciously, compose a sense of the ultimate character of reality and then stake their lives on that sense of things.” “Did you hear that,” Andy asked? “We stake our lives on all of the perceptions we have. In other words, we make all of our decisions based out of our faith or out of how we make meaning of life.”

Upon hearing this, I decided that ideas like the one Andy the airline pilot had explained to me were important and that we should spend more time reevaluating how we make meaning in life. This is why I am passionate about mentoring students and building deep and meaningful relationships, encouraging them to make thoughtful choices through a critical evaluation of the ideas that they hold as truth. I do not do this because it is part of my job, but because it is a part of who I am.