Engaging Students

The Hall Director position at the University of New Hampshire is a generalist position which provides a good foundation for future work in student affairs.  Hall directors spend their time focusing on a variety of job tasks in their halls, many of which are focused on developmental contact with students.  Overall, we strive to create an experience that is fun, diverse, challenging, validating, autonomous and holistic. 
We hope that about half of a hall director’s time will be spent engaging in either a reactive manner (conduct, roommate conflicts, etc.) or a proactive manner (individual conduct, programming, etc.). The other 50% of their time should be sufficient for the remaining job expectations.  There will be times when more than 40 hours per week will be necessary (opening) and other times when less than 40 hours per week will be appropriate.

Please click on the video clip below to listen to Kristin Carpenter - Assistant Directors of Residential Life.

Kristin Carpenter Video Interview

Curricular Educational Outreach

We believe that college students are learning and growing in and out of the classroom, and that our hall staff can provide much of that out-of-class education.   The foundation for this educational outreach comes from our four mission areas (academic engagement, diversity engagement, healthy living, and citizenship), but we are constantly encouraging hall directors to work their hobbies and passions into their educational outreach.  Formal programs are one way to educate students, and we also encourage hall directors to use additional methods such as one-on-one contact with residents, thought-provoking columns in their hall’s bi-monthly newsletter, and other innovative ideas that suit the community. Ultimately each hall director creates a curriculum that lays out a plan for educating residents in a comprehensive, engaging way. 

Supervision

Our core expectation is that hall directors are providing a balance of challenge and support to their RAs in formal (one-on-one meetings and staff meetings) and informal (time on the floors, at programs) settings.  Because we have a variety of different-sized halls the supervisory experience varies.  Some hall directors supervise 3-4 RAs, while others supervise 10-12 RAs and a Senior RA, who supervises the other 4-5 RAs.  Our RHDs are very present in the halls and have a lot of contact with residents, and this tends to enrich the RA/RHD relationship. 

Administration

Hall directors perform a variety of administrative work.  These tasks are typically associated with housing assignments, room inventories, staff supervision, the Residential Life database, judicial cases, hall newsletters, and staying on top of email.  We expect that administrative work is done accurately and on-time, and beyond that, we give hall directors the flexibility to create administrative systems that work for them and for the needs of their hall.   
Team Membership

While we support hall director autonomy, we also have an expectation that they will be engaged with the larger staff team in small and large group settings, in formal and informal ways.  We meet once a week on Wednesday mornings for three hours and we use this time to share ideas and engage in debate about current topics.  We think a healthy work environment begins with a strong team foundation, and grows even stronger when the group experiences small amounts of dissonance.  While we have basic expectations about team membership, we also recognize that people engage in large and small team settings in a variety of ways and we try to make space for that diversity of expression.  Lastly, we imagine many people would say that they came to UNH because of the people and because of the warm feeling they got when visiting campus.  We have fun here, we care about each other and some people would even say our team feels like a family. 

Committee and Division Assignments

We expect each hall director to serve on one internal (Res Life) committee and then most hall directors have the option to serve on an external team or committee (because of the time commitment related to the tall halls, we discourage tall hall directors from serving on anything in addition to their internal committee).  To read more about the committees, visit this site: 

Committee and Division Assignments