I know the season is upon us — for first-years, just barely settling into the college routine; for sophomores, emerging more eagerly from the social groups they solidified last spring; for juniors like me, wondering if we can still make a difference. Applications for Resident Adviser positions may have just opened earlier this month for the 2017-18 school year, but for many students on this campus, applying has been a checkbox on their to-do lists since arriving on campus.

Some people come in as the older sibling and primary caregiver of five kids and are natural facilitators for a role that demands knowing up to a couple dozen students, and some are motivated by exceptionally positive or negative RA experiences on Commons. But regardless of background, it seems to me lately that the popular convention of what qualifies someone for “being a Vandy RA” now falls in the range of other campus titles associated with LinkedIn skills like Leadership and Interpersonal Communication: We are all familiar with the RA-VUCeptor-tour guide trifecta. One problem with this association is that it’s the equivalent of saying you’re great at managing groups, so you’ll be a great RA.

Yet even more off-putting is the blasé attitude I’ve come up against so frequently when I tell people I’m an RA: “Oh, but that’s easy!” and every alternative form of “Yeah, but you don’t have to do anything for that job.” I’m not sure how that sentiment became so common, but I can begin to guess based on some anecdotes involving Commons RAs who were never present for the population who arguably needed them most, or whose duty-round methodology involved sticking their head out of the elevator on each floor instead of getting out and actually walking down each hall. From one current RA to the whole prospective lot: These are not the precedents I hope you follow if you wish to work as a fellow RA on this campus.

RAs are equipped with the singular capacity to recognize and engage with all their residents — and this is decidedly separate from simply “having” the capacity to engage at that level, because it emphasizes the fact that that ability is given unto them by their official job detail.

Consider the everyday manner in which you might engage with your residents and nonresidents alike — being an effective RA demands real work and real dedication in real time. There’s a line I love from a New York Times article that sums it up like this: “Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life.” This isn’t networking, this is knowing that an international Chinese student who lived across the hall from me one year hadn’t had authentic Sichuan (the province our families are both from) food since coming to Vanderbilt, and inviting her to get some together. This is realizing a couple weeks ago that the prevailing elevator system in Morgan House was terribly inefficient, and asking our new Area Maintenance Supervisor to program them to home floors like the existing setup in Lewis. Not out of moral obligation, but out of attentiveness to needs that were in my capacity to fulfill.

In that sense, I view cultivating strong communities as an RA’s civic responsibility — after all, it’s in everyone’s favor to be kind and welcoming to the people in their immediate vicinity. In fact, if you look up social research involving quantifiable interactions with strangers and feelings of connectedness, all the data indicates that even a simple “Hello” on the street has profound effects on a person’s happiness level, and the more eye contact and engagements, the more connected people feel to the world around them. This happiness even correlates directly with productivity. These types of small engagements and their importance in people’s overall emotions are no coincidence — it’s the premise of all human interaction. But it takes the huge modern initiative to look that person you pass every morning in the eye to launch that cascade of positivity, and we’re not even talking about smiling or saying Hello yet.

There’s a central point here: RAs have many duties behind the scenes, but their most salient interactions are the ones that impact their residents on a daily, especially spoken, basis. They’re equipped with the singular capacity to recognize and engage with all their residents — and this is decidedly separate from simply “having” the capacity to engage at that level, because it emphasizes the fact that that ability is given unto them by their official job detail. It elevates a simple interpersonal capacity to relate to their students to a responsibility and a privilege.

As the face of a community and part of a role that by definition should welcome the lives of students, I hope you can be the positive human interaction that residents might not even know they need.

The fact is that as upperclassmen residents, we don’t meet the people living on our floors unless we come face to face with them, and even when that happens (in elevators, on the floor), we often don’t know they’re our neighbors until we’ve parted ways, or they end up just being guests. There’s no way for us to interact with all the people around us even if we do take the initiative with everyone we see to say hello. However, as an RA, you know exactly who’s around you and whom you’re obligated to — and those microinteractions, however inconsequential to the grand scheme of everyone’s personal life, are exactly what contributes to the difference between living in a community of fellow Vanderbilt students and living on your own with no one around you at all.

I know I didn’t make the conscious decision to live among my peers just to ignore them, but this is what I often see at the upperclassmen housing level. As an RA, I’m now equipped with the initiative to recognize the people on my floor and guarantee them that if they should pass one person they know only vaguely but feel comfortable greeting, it’ll be me. And this ease of familiarity is especially vital to those students who don’t have many other communities they feel they belong to: At the very least, I will guarantee that they know they belong in the building they live in. Sometimes when the going gets especially rough, it’s the smallest thing like that affirmation of belonging that keeps us holding on. And many times, it can take just one person to make that huge difference.

As an RA, you’re not expected to be best friends with all your residents. But as the face of a community and part of a role that by definition should welcome the lives of students, I hope you can be the positive human interaction that residents might not even know they need.

And for the record, I polled my area RAs on what their top personal qualifications for being an RA were, and the answers ranged from self-motivated to empathetic to adaptive and genuine. Not one of these characteristics are calculable, and not one of them involves “managing” people like most people think of when it comes to leadership positions. And for good reason, too — because if you’re looking for a primary leadership role out of the RA position, I’d advise you to look elsewhere. Your residents will gain nothing from your ability to organize a group project, but I promise if you are willing to engage them in your life by taking the time to know them and serving as their personal advocates, both you and they will better understand the real work of life.

Kathy Yuan is a junior in the Peabody College of Education and Human Development and Opinion Editor of the Vanderbilt Hustler. She can be reached at [email protected].