I was once a young, wide-eyed, Lil 5–anticipating, party-going Hoosier like yourself.
And then, out of a deeply ingrained desire to uphold law and order and document the transgressions of my fellow peers in the residence halls, I decided to sell my soul to work for the man.
I became a resident assistant.
In reality, my compulsion to become an RA didn’t come from a need to ruin or suck the fun from the lives of fun-loving freshmen, or anyone else for that matter.
By nature, I’ve always been a helper. I like people, and I like to make them happy. I like to listen.
As an eldest child, I’ve been raised to be a leader and to be responsible.
Being an RA seemed to be the perfect way to put these particular qualities to good use in exchange for room, board and quality community-building experience.
Thus far, it has exceeded those expectations and been an invaluable growing experience.
I know that my fellow staff members, who have become almost like family during the past year, feel the same way.
So believe me when I say this to you: We do not want to get you in trouble.
When we ask you to be safe and to keep the volume down, it isn’t because we’re 80-year-olds stuck in 20-year-old bodies and want you to stop having fun and get off our lawns.
When we tell you not to drink in the halls, it isn’t because Residential Programs and Services has blackened our souls, stolen the joy from our lives and equipped us with monogrammed fanny packs.
It’s because as your peers, we’ve been entrusted, to a certain degree, with the responsibility of looking out for you. We want you to celebrate the greatest college weekend in the world and live to tell the tale.
While we, like you, look forward to the bike races, concerts and festivities throughout the week, we are also haunted by the specter of the true-life Little 500 horror stories we have heard and by the uneasy anticipation of the many things that could go wrong under our watch this weekend.
We encourage you to make good decisions now because we know that a nagging from us will hurt you a lot less than an arrest from one of the five police forces that will be in town.
We don’t want your Pizza X and summer road trip funds to be completely depleted by a $500 drinking fine.
It would make us extremely sad to see any of you having to attend mandatory court and campus judicial board hearings, along with required disciplinary substance education seminars.
Worse still, it would break our hearts to see you hauled away by EMS workers because you didn’t know your limits.
In all seriousness, we really do care about you.
We love IU, and we want you to have the time of your lives this Lil 5 with memories unscathed by all the things that can and often do go so, so very wrong.
Go wild, go hard, go ham and what have you, but please, don’t do anything we wouldn’t do.
— kabeasle@indiana.edu
