I am a Resident Hall Director (RHD) at Austin Peay State University on top of being a full time student and a Govs Ambassador. My life as a RHD is very interesting. I have a staff of 4 and at least 80 residents that I am responsible for. I am the RHD for Rawlins Hall. I am also the co-Chair for the Training Committee in Housing. The Training Committee is responsible for making training for Fall and Spring. Also, we are responsible for finding out the good and bad of training and improving it. I co-Chair the committee with my immediate supervisor, Leslie Barger. She is new to Austin Peay, but is not new to Housing. She comes from another rival University. She is a great boss and an even better listener.
Before becoming a RHD I was a RA in Hand Village, and I also sat duty nights in Rawlins and Cross when I had to. It used to be all male, but with the increase in students that want to live on campus the powers that be (my bosses) converted it to a coed hall. The first two floors are males and the third floor is females. It has been interesting with a lot of funny stories. I have a great staff and I am very proud to work with. My whole staff is new at our job including me except Danterius. I am a first year RHD and Ashley, Brian, and Colten are first time RA’s.
Meeting my Staff
Danterius (“D” or “Dan” nicknames that people call him) is our vet of the group. He has been a RA for a while (at least 2 or more years). He is great to our staff and he brings leadership and experience to help the first time RA’s. Also, he knows a lot of the residents that have been at Rawlins for a while. He also works at a movie theater. Unfortunately, D is graduating this year and will be moving on to bigger and better things. I wish him luck in the future.
Brian is another first time RA. He is a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity. He recently just started working at Texas Longhorn. Sidenote: they have great steaks. Brian brings a laid back and calmness to the Rawlins staff. He graduates this year and I also wish him luck in the future.
Colten is another first time RA. He brings a laid back, calmness and funny approach to the job. He has a great girlfriend who serves as a secretary for him sometimes. The secretary comment is a positive one because she helps him with paperwork. Sidenote: I have a secretary to. This is Colten’s first and last year in Housing. He is moving on to bigger and better things in life. I wish him the best.
Ashley is my only girl and is also a Govs Ambassador. She is also a member of the Chi Omega women’s sorority. It is weird sometimes because one minute I am her boss (supervisor, if you want to get technical) and the next I am working side by side with her in Govs as an equal. We have found that balance and it makes working with her fun and easy. She is also the cook. When we have bonding times and the RHD is suppose to cook for their staff, that responsibility gets handed over to Ashley in which she gladly accepts because she loves to cook. If you see the pictures so also made us shirts.
Shirt Story
If you work for Housing or live in Housing we have different names for each building. Rawlins has always been nicknamed, the Raw Dogs. The nickname is not meant to mean anything bad about the building or the people, it is something that was just picked up. That was a story before the story. Rawlins the staff decided to embrace that name, but we had to change it around because we could not be raw because we now had females in our hall. So I nicknamed us “Raw Puppies”. We have different events and competitions among the resident halls during training and we wanted to show our hall spirit, hence the idea of the shirts. We knew other halls would make shirts to so we had to go over and beyond so our shirts were the best. The final product is what you see in the pictures below.

Rawlins, he front of the shirts Ashley made.

Rawlins, the back of the shirt

Rawlins Staff in Brandon Springs