One year down...one more to go!!!

Hello all,

Let me take a moment to introduce myself.  My name is Evan Schaefer and I am currently a Program Adviser/Graduate Assistant for the University Program Board (UPB) at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN.  I just completed my first year of graduate school and plan to graduate in May 2009 with a Masters in Higher Education Administration.  My undergraduate was done at Simpson College, a small liberal arts college in Indianola, IA (about 20 miles south of Des Moines) where I received my Bachelor of Music Education degree.  Believe it or not, I actually have a license to teach in the State of Iowa.  But, I chose a different path after college.  Simpson has a campus population of about 2,000 students which made my transition to the 16,000 St. Cloud State University that much more difficult.  Overall, my experience has been phenomenal and I would not change anything about it.

 As I am now currently taking my last academic class to fulfill the course work for my program, I look back and realize I have only been here for one year.  It is hard to believe that I officially started my second year at the turn of the fiscal year which, as most of you know, is July 1.  There are many things about my graduate assistantship that have helped me become who I am today.  Going from a small school to a large school was the biggest transition that I had to make.  I was used to people on campus knowing who I was and being able to have a conversation with anyone that walked by me because I either sat through a class with them, met them at a CAB event or just knew them from another organization.  From the aspect of taking classes, I was petrified about the first day of class.  In my case, my classes were all on the weekend (Friday night and then all day Saturday - every other weekend throughout the first semester...sounds worse than it is, I will explain that later.) so I really wasn’t sure who all was going to be in my class.  When I first walked in to the class I was amazed because I was definitely the youngest one in the room.  There was only one other student in the room that was a graduate assistant from another department that also came directly from his undergraduate institution.  All the other people in my class (soon to become my HIED (Higher Education) cohort) came from a variety of different disciplines.  The different people in the room represented Financial Aid, Human Resources, Admissions, Foreign Language Faculty & Information Technology.  As you can see there was a very diverse amount of people making up my HIED cohort.  It made my classes so much interesting because I was able to bring the Student Affairs aspect to the table because this is one area most of them didn’t really understand.

 As for my graduate assistantship, I would be lying to you if I said that I came in prepared and ready for ANYTHING!!  I was rudely awakened very quickly.  Come to find out, I don’t know everything like I thought I did, HA!  It's weird how long it takes one to realize that.  My first event was pretty intense.  It was the Johnny Holm band concert here on the SCSU campus during the Fall Kickoff activities.  Now, if you are from Minnesota reading this, you understand how intense these shows can get in terms of attendance.  I was absolutely amazed by the amount of people that turned out for this event.  I think the final number came out to be about 1500 students.  I don’t know about you, but being my first event, and coming from a campus that had about 2000 students, that was like having an event where EVERYONE from Simpson was in attendance.  It was intense but AWESOME all at the same time.  My job was simple: front of house security.  Yes, I was in charge of making sure no one charged the stage.  If you are going to ask me what kind of barricade we used, save your breath because it was definitely just me, two of my students and the Public Safety officer coordinator.  Yep, there were only four of us keeping 1500 students from running onto the stage.  The hardest part was making sure that the students didn’t crowd surf.  Due to such a confined space, there was really no other place for the students to go except down.  So many times I had to go in and get students off of other students from mosh pitting and crowd surfing.  If you have never met me, I am 6'4" 2XX lbs. (we just met and I never disclose that information right away, HA! just think BIG!) and very claustrophobic which made my life just that much better.  But, it was my first event and I didn’t want to say anything so I just went with it.  Before the night started I was given a name tag by my director and told to wear it at all the events that UPB puts on.  I said okay and proceeded to put it on.  To my dismay, I managed to somehow, in the midst of the crowd surfing and mosh pitting, get my name tag knocked off of my body and thrown into the crowd.  Needless to say I was out a name tag on the first event day and not sure what to do.  During the clean up one of the students found it pummeled into the ground with a lot of scratches and cracks making it look like it had fallen into a trash compacter.  It was pretty awesome because we referred to the experience as my initiation into the department.  I will have you know that he is coming back this year and we will be having barricade!

I think that is enough for today.  Stay tuned because I am going to talk more about my course work and other events that have highlighted my first year!