Day in the life of a CSAA Student!

Hello!

I’ve been asked to talk about a day in the life of a CSAA student. In all honesty, each of us has a very different day every day and it’s hard to have a “typical day,” if that’s actually a thing. Depending on the time of year, the week, what’s due, what work looks like, and almost any other factor, my days tend to look a little to a lot different from other days, but I’ll give this a try. I can say that the only constants in my days are snacks.

I’ll try to walk you through a typical Thursday for me. My current assistantship is at Emory University in Atlanta working with leadership programs in the Office of Student Leadership and Service. Because my assistantship is off-site, I leave a little early to be able to get to work by 9:00. I usually wake up around 5:30 to pick up a few other students and get on the road by 7:00. The drive isn’t awful, and it’s nice to have a few other CSAA students to carpool with, but my experience at Emory makes it totally worth sitting in traffic for a bit. On Thursdays, I either have a full staff meeting with the full staff of our currently forming center (involving the Office of Student Leadership and Service, the Office of Sorority and Fraternity Life, and the Center for Community Partnerships) or a cluster meeting with the staff working with leadership programs and student organizations in the morning. We talk about upcoming programs and vision building for our newly forming center, and it’s a great way to stay connected with the staff working in other parts of our Center that I don’t typically get to work with. After that, it’s 100% snack and/or lunch time, and there’s a ton of great food options near our office. I mainly focus on wherever there is guacamole.

After lunch, I typically try to work on whatever I need to do for whatever program I have coming up. I work with our Emerging Leader Experience (a program for first year students to engage in conversations about leadership, personal and institutional values), Emory LeaderShape (a national leadership development program that some campuses host sessions of), and Emory’s Executive Round Table Series (a dinner series for juniors and seniors designed to help them engage with several prominent Atlanta-area speakers, alumni, and faculty). Most afternoons, I’ll work on whatever logistics need to happen to make those events work. I also sometimes work on a little curriculum development for some of our programs, and will sometimes spend my afternoon looking at options and benchmarking with other institutions. There are also a ton of fantastic people at Emory, so some weeks I have the opportunity to grab coffee with other staff from other functional areas, or get to chat with people that work in my office over snacks (I told you, this is a constant).

On Thursday evenings, Emory’s Student Programming Council (SPC) meets, and I’ve been able to be a part of their meetings to help with some of their larger programs. They put on Homecoming, which is a little different at Emory because there is no football team (though they have shirts that say they’re undefeated in football). Instead of a football-focused weekend, they host concerts on campus. This year, they brought Cash Cash (you’ve heard one of their songs but you just don’t know it), Sugar Ray (it was the best 90s throwback I’ve experienced), and Misterwives (they’re going to be famous, I swear – also shameless plug, they have a new album coming out in February). It’s an awesome group to work with and definitely a lot of excitement, and I’ve felt very lucky to have this experience working with campus programming on top of the leadership program initiatives. Once that meeting wraps, we jump back in the car and head back to Athens. There’s usually a strong push to get home in time for Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, and usually CSAA people will watch together because nobody can/should deal with that kind of shock alone. Then I go back to bed because it’s late and I wake back up on Friday morning and repeat a lot of this back at Emory again.

I think that’s it! My other days involve class but I feel like other people might write a little more about that in the future. Also other days we do fun things outside of class and work, and I assume other people will talk about this, too!

-Andrew

Andrew Brugman and is a first year Masters student in the College Student Affairs Administration program at the University of Georgia. He’s originally from Marquette, MI (it’s on the Upper Peninsula and almost everybody forgets that they’re up there) and graduated in 2013 from Northwestern University outside of Chicago. For the year following graduation, he served as a Leadership Consultant for his fraternity, visiting and consulting with existing chapters and helping start a new group at the University of Wisconsin. Outside of work and school, he really likes hiking (he’s on a quest to visit all the National Parks in the US) and any kind of live music.