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Taking the Pulse
supervisor changes felt this turnover made it difficult to share anything with them.
This may signal that student staff who experienced supervisor changes felt defeated or
helpless. This dynamic was, in many ways, the antithesis of a typical training, which is
done in person to create high levels of familiarity and community.
Lynch's (2022) analysis of the physical and emotional costs of working in a helping
profession may help to explain some of these dynamics. Student affairs professionals
are called upon monthly, on average, to support students in trauma, which can lead
to the helper experiencing secondary trauma. The fact that many crisis situations in a
residence hall are initially discovered by paraprofessional staff could help explain why
hall staff indicated a high rate of depression. Additionally, given that the overall hall
staff experience was very different than expected-Zoom training experiences, fewer
direct opportunities to create community-the prevalence of secondary trauma could
be expected to be higher (Lynch, 2022).
While department and campus leadership provided updates, offered opportunities
to connect via Zoom, and made adjustments to student staff responsibilities in order
to promote safety, student staff credited their own resources as mechanisms to cope
with stress. Student staff managed to develop community among themselves in spite
of social distancing protocols. They also used campus counseling services, registered
for emotional support animals, and took regular breaks away from the residence halls
as a means of coping with the pandemic challenges.
IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Through this highly difficult experience of navigating a pandemic, campus administrators
have learned that timely institutional responses are important in supporting the
mental health and well-being of student staff. During the 2020-21 year, administrators
and professional residential life staff held several town hall meetings and open forums
with live-in student staff to listen to their concerns and then made timely adjustments
in response. As reiterated in the focus groups, student staff expressed fear and anxiety
about their in-person job duties such as handling key lock-outs and responding to crises
on-site as the anxiety of contracting COVID-19 during any general face-to-face interactions
was always present. In response, the residential life department made adjustments.
Professional staff (resident directors and assistant directors) assumed more of
the in-person responsibilities of student staff such as making duty rounds and handling
key lock-outs. Operational procedures were reviewed by professional staff looking for
ways to modify standard safety protocols in order to reduce staff exposure. For example,
residential life professionals engaged in site visits and walkthroughs of every residential
community, something that would normally be done by student hall staff. They identified
significant ways to modify and/or reduce risk. For example, new pathways for
handling lockouts, such as utilizing stairwells (instead of elevators), were implemented.
Additionally, the department created internal documents to track all questions
and inquiries that were coming in, and student and professional hall staff could access
these at any given time. The questions were grouped and then residential life
managers or administrators were assigned sections to provide timely updates. This
120 The Journal of College and University Student Housing

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