Joni Valerie Lamarre Laurent

Mid Term Reflection

I am doing my practicum in Residence Education Central Office at Georgia Southern

University. My mentor is the Associate Director for Residential curriculum. Cathy really helps
me understand all aspects of housing and residence live. I currently serve on the advisory
committee for The Lead & Serve living learning community. This living learning community is
comprised of 45 students that live together in the residence hall and have a common goal to be
developed in leadership and volunteer together. The students take one course together which is
the lead 2000 course and each week do different service projects together. Throughout the
community there are three interest groups; one of the groups is involved with doing work in
downtown Statesboro, another one is very passionate about homelessness so they work with the
homeless community in Statesboro and lastly there's a group of students that are very interested
in working with animals.
Through my experience in residence education I'm trying to gain an understanding of the
learning outcomes set forth by the office and how I can incorporate them in the experiences I
have with the students. Ways that I've tried to orient myself with the students is truly to just get
to know them, this means I am going to biweekly meetings and letting them know that I'm a
resource for them, I've also establish this mentor and program to work with students that are at
risk academically so they hold below a 2.5 GPA and anyone else that wants to talk to me. Rating
my practicum experience I would scale it about a 4.5 because I'm really gaining some
understanding of housing that I didn't have before and my mentor giving me an opportunity to
explore anything I want. I'm branching out and not just working with Lead & serve but also

helping with anything that anyone needs within the department , I have had the opportunity to
work with community leader retreats and interview which will help me as I begin job searching.

One of the components of my portfolio in which I'd like to focus on is my Research Design
Proposal for my Educational Research which focused on retaining students of color in Higher
education with student involvement. Throughout this paper I focus on Austin's developmental
theory of student involvement in it describes how students develop in relation to being involved
inside and outside of the classroom.
What students gain from being involved in the living learning community directly relates to the
extent in which they are involved in their course work and as a whole. Ideally this means that
their academic performance is correlated with their involvement I think that this helps me
understand how students how to relate with students that are at-risk academically.
The biggest eye-opener of my experience thus far it would have to be how students did
academically within the Lead & Serve community. Typically students in living learning
communities do greater academically than their peers not living in the community. Of the 45
students within the community about 14 performed below a 2.5 GPA. When discussing this with
my practicum supervisor she was also surprised with that data, so we came up with a plan that I
will be mentoring the students with below a 2.5 GPA to see where they're at academically this
semester as well and to provide them with the with any additional support through University or
the Academic Success Center.

Through my experience these last seven weeks I've noticed that my supervisor is very
similar to how I would like to be as a professional the field. She values open and direct
communication and talking through issues. Her administrative philosophy is to execute tasks

correctly in a timely matter. As far as our differences so far I haven't noticed anything large, we
meet every monday to discuss my progress with my assigned tasks and go through any issues
that have come up.

When it comes to identifying areas in which I wish I had more knowledge or skills to
perform better within my practicum experience I would have to say it deals with student
developmental theory and the lack of it within the program. I work first-year students and outside
of the reading that I've done for leisure the programs hasn't really set me up for success. Overall I
am enjoying my practicum, and it makes me want to pursue housing as one of the functional
areas that I would like to work in after graduation.