The program at James Madison University
is intended to prepare student affairs
professionals who will have that
opportunity to truly understand what the
profession is about, and also be very
well prepared to actually do the work.
We've taken the knowledge that students
learn in the classroom to understand
theory, to understand the trends and the
issues in higher education, and then
they're able to put that into practice
at both their assistantship and their
practicum.
Over the summer I had the
opportunity to create my own practicum
experience with the Center for
Multicultural Student Services. What I
wanted from my summer practicum
experience was more work with
assessment, and more stuff behind the
scenes, and I definitely had that
opportunity with CMSS summer
programs where they had these camps that would
come to campus and I worked behind the
scenes to gather information from past
participants so they can build a better
picture for the success of their program
and the participants that go through it.
There's a good balance between the
classroom aspect and also the
experiential learning aspect and so I
think JMU focuses on making sure that we
learn material in the classroom but also
have the opportunity to implement it in
the field in a more practical experience.
I tell you our students when
they go to those job interviews they
blow people away, because our program is
very intentional, in terms of you can see
from our website where counseling based
and where experiential based and we also
have assessment. But I love to when
they'll ask that question is to "tell us
one theory you advocate and how you use
it?" You talk about I learned this theory
in class and in my assistantship we
created an assessment instrument where
we determine where students were at in a
pretest and then we did an intentional
intervention with performance-based
objectives, we created and by
instructional design of program and intervention
that move them along in terms of the
theory to the next stage the next vector
or whatever that may be and there's
people across from you interviewing you
will not only say "boy this person is the
best person for the job," they will say "we
need them because I don't know what
they're talking about,"
and that's true and our students will
when they go for those job interviews we
hear that all the time.
Simulation University let me know how to
do a budget and how to handle a budget
cut and let me handle sort of the things
that came to me every day. All the work
that we did with assessment help me
understand learning outcomes and how to
create those learning outcomes and find
out if we've met them, and then being
able to sit in a room with a student who
was telling me about the challenges of
his family but to be present in the room
with the students because my counseling
experience and counseling classes here
really have made a difference and for me
to be able to come back and serve this
community 18 years later I never would
be able to have had the success I've had
my career and be able to make the
difference in the lives of others
without the foundation I got from the
college student personnel administration
program here JMU.
The faculty members are actual living
practitioners so you're actually gaining
insight from people who have done this
work for numerous amount of years and
you're gaining this insight from them
that hopefully you'll be able to take
with you as you go into your experience.
It's been a really unique experience
got to go through the class being a
student and then learn more about
assessment and now I'm teaching it to
CSPA students and I really believe in
Student Affairs and so I wanted to be
part of the movement to help
bring assessment into student affairs
that make it much more robust in the field.
We're offered the opportunity to question university
practices in a very applicable way but
we also get to question our own values
and judgment about what goes on in
universities and being in class and
being able to kind of wonder about those
things out loud. We get to come to more
useful understandings about really tough
topics that are present in university
work.
One of the reasons I chose the organization development
assistantship in student activities and
involvement it's because I wanted an
experience that I hadn't had previously.
I just looking for something completely
different out of my comfort zone so that
could really challenge myself, I've
gotten to supervise students plan
large-scale events like our Student Org Night,
collaborate with some really amazing
offices and meet some really cool people
and make those connections and network with them.
Almost
every week we go to a professional
development session and then we also
have to go to external professional
developments as well. One of those
opportunities could be conferences we
actually get a travel fund in the
program to be able to travel to
different conferences. One of the most
popular ones is the Virginia student
services conference which I actually
presented at this year. It's really cool
to be able to go to those different
opportunities and network and meet other
people and work on different skills that
you could build while you're here in the program.
I chose JMU's CSVA
program one because it's counseling
based. I'm very passionate
about mental health issues and how we're gonna tackle
those issues in the  future with our students
and our education and so the counseling
based program I'm interested in learning
more theories and techniques on how to
apply those to help students no matter
what office I'm interested in. And I also
really love the cohort size and the
community everyone at JMU is very welcoming.
Another benefit to the cohort
is that it's very similar to a staff or
department team that you could have in
the future I think that as a cohort
we've kind of formed stormed and normed
that's very Student Affairs but we're
comfortable discussing things on a
deeper level with one another because we
know each other so well and I think
that's very similar to what you're going
to experience if you work on a staff.
You're gonna get used to people you're
gonna be able to talk to people in
different ways and you're gonna have to
work through problems and I think that
it's preparing you for the future in a
way that you didn't even expect.
