Ryan Davis Joins Student Life

Posted by Andrew Koss in admin

Ryan Davis, the director of student life, oversees numerous departments on campus. Photo by Yoana Medrano.

Ryan Davis wears a bowtie to work every Wednesday. It’s a holdover from his previous job, where he inspired his co-workers and students to join him in celebrating Bowtie Wednesday each week. Davis owns at least 30 bowties, so students probably won’t see him in the same tie twice. In his new role as director of Student Life, he hopes the unusual attire will bring a smile to people’s faces.

“It’s formal, but it’s not so serious,” he says.

Davis obtained a master’s degree in counseling from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, but when it came time to sit for professional licensing, he realized that his true passion lay with residence life.

“When I was doing my master’s in counseling, I had four internships,” Davis says, “and my favorite internship, above and beyond, was working at a college counseling center. I also felt during my internship that a lot of the students that I was working with didn’t need a counselor. They needed an administrator, they needed someone they could go to, they just needed someone to talk to. … I felt, after completing my degree, that the best way I could serve students based upon my experience was to go back into student life.”

Davis applies the skills he learned in obtaining his counseling degree to his job at SFUAD, working with students to resolve their problems.

“Students, when they come in, can be very angry, or very hurt, or very scared, or very worried, and that may come across and communicate a message that they are hostile or they don’t want to work with you,” Davis says. “My counseling skills have taught me to say, ‘Let’s dig deeper than what they’re presenting. They’re worried. Why are they worried? They’re worried about these things. How can we address these things?’”

At the beginning of the semester, Davis and Housing Manager Tim Chambers met with several students who planned to live off campus, but still had housing charges on their accounts.

Housing Manager Tim Chambers oversees the resident assistants and meets with students about housing issues. Photo by Yoana Medrano.

“They hadn’t gone through the process of getting approval,” Davis tells Jackalope. “Maybe they had talked to somebody before us and somebody had said verbally, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s fine.’ But they never went through a formal process. There was never anything in writing, so those students were really upset.”

Davis sees the Student Life department as a safe haven, a testing ground for students to express their frustration and subsequently learn how to deal with problems in a more effective manner. Once the housing process was explained to students, they received approval to live off campus. He says the experience showed students that Student Life staff can be trusted, and taught them how to communicate properly in the future.

The director of Student Life position carries a great deal of responsibility, overseeing numerous departments on campus, including the Driscoll Fitness Center, the Student Health Center, the mail room, housing, student conduct, the Necessities store and student activities. Some of Davis’ job involves overseeing budgetary concerns and ensuring these departments adhere to federal regulations, but he primarily serves as support.

“My job, typically, is to come in every day and ask how I can help them to do their job,” he says.

Davis serves as a supervisor to Student Life staff, but he’s not exactly bossing people around.

“I try not to run a top-down system. I try to work collaboratively,” he says. In his work with students, he doesn’t “come in and tell them what to do. I come in and say, ‘What do you want to do? How can we do this? Where do you think we should do this?’ My job a lot of times is to ask questions and to help groups of people come up with answers for themselves.”

Student Activities Board Manager Meg Colburn jumps at the chance to sing Davis’ praises.

“Ryan is exactly what this campus needs. He is organized, he is approachable, he genuinely cares about every single student on this campus. He has already done things that half this campus doesn’t even know about,” Colburn says. “He went out with us until 10 p.m. the other night just so that we could get all of our stuff for the dance.”

As the new sheriff in town, Davis recognizes it’s important not to rush in guns blazing, making changes left and right.

“When you’re new, you don’t necessarily know everything,” he tells Jackalope. “You don’t know what’s happened in the past, what’s working, what’s not working. So a lot of it is trying to stay still for a while and make sure that I understand the culture and what the students want and expect.”

One small change already made comes in the form of redesigned student IDs, tailored to reflect SFUAD’s art school atmosphere. Davis also helped Student Voice execute a long-awaited recycling program on campus, and worked with Chambers to update the student handbook. Chambers joined the staff on the same day as Davis, July 12, taking over housing duties from Connor Nelson, who left SFUAD at the end of the Fall 2015 semester. Chambers also oversees the resident assistants and serves as the chief judicial officer, meeting with students when necessary about conduct code violations.

“People in our profession tend to have been at multiple institutions, and bring with them a lot of experiences,” Chambers says. “We can see the pros and cons of different approaches, play it out in real practical time and be able to apply that knowledge here. It’s also typical for an institution to hold for a year before they suddenly begin making major changes, so they can get to know the student culture … what the individual needs are of students, and what the more global needs of students are, and make their choices accordingly.”

Student Life Operations Manager Heather “Maz” Mazorow has a list of responsibilities at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, some of which include managing the mail room, parking permits, and running Necessities. Photo by Yoana Medrano.

Student Life Operations Manager Heather “Maz” Mazorow joined SFUAD in March 2016, and spent most of the summer as the sole staff member in her department. Her list of responsibilities is so long she has trouble remembering it all, but it includes the campus mail room, parking, acting as liaison for the student health insurance plan and running Necessities. Once Davis and Chambers joined the team, she finally got a chance to breathe.

“Once they stepped in and took housing and all that, I could basically go back to my job,” Mazorow says, “which made it a lot easier to actually focus on the committees that I was a part of. And then focusing more strictly on some of the tasks that I had to go into for fall.”

Mazorow took over Necessities on Aug. 3, putting the store back in the hands of Student Life after a year of being managed by Bon Appetit.

“I’m still trying to get all of the systems in place for it. I got my staff finally hired,” Mazorow says.

With so much turnover in the Student Life department, it’s difficult for students to know who to approach with a specific concern. There’s not a precise corollary between past staff members and current Student Life employees. As positions lay vacant for months at a time, staff often performed the job duties of more than one individual. Davis’ duties most closely resemble those carried out by former Assistant Director of Student Affairs and Operations Jeremy Hadley, who left SFUAD in June 2016. But even if students are confused about who to contact, Davis has the problem covered.

“I’ve worked really hard to make sure that everybody over here is cross trained so if you need housing, you can come to me,” he says. “If you want to start a student club you can talk to Tim and he can tell you how to get the process rolling. There are some limits to that. There are certain things that we keep in our areas for consistency’s sake.” Otherwise, all Student Life staff members can help “so that students don’t have to feel like they have to catch one of us or they’re out of luck.”

Student workers also help fill the gaps when Davis, Chambers and Mazorow are unavailable. And if that’s not enough, Davis eats lunch in his office every day in case students need to drop by during lunchtime. He also plans to add one more staff member to the Student Life team. The campus life coordinator will pick up some of the slack for items that Davis hasn’t had time for.

Housing Manager Tim Chambers and Student Life Operations Manager Heather “Maz” Mazorow both joined the Student Life team in 2016. Photo by Yoana Medrano.

For example, he says “the campus life person might decide Monday that they want to do a spontaneous event on Thursday in the dining hall at lunch. And they’ll go over at lunch and do a pie-eating contest or something else, just for fun. I haven’t had the time necessary to do so…Our students are notorious for working long hours on projects and on rehearsals and on papers and all kinds of stuff. So to be able to add an element of fun and relaxation to all that, and to be able to bring people together from across campus as a community, is really important.”

Now that the start-of-semester rigmarole is complete, Davis looks forward to viewing the fruits of students’ labor.

“I’m really excited to see these students, that I work with on a daily basis, perform here on campus,” he says.

It was his own interest in the arts that drew him to work for SFUAD in the first place.

“When I saw the soundstages and I saw all the different opportunities and the spaces that students have, I just wanted to be a part of it,” Davis says. On his first night in Santa Fe, he marveled at the variety of artistic sensibilities and lifestyles in the city. “I thought that that was really great and a really wonderful place for students to be able to learn and to discover who they are, not only on campus, but in the community. … How better to explore who you are during this crucial and developmental time then to see people who’ve decided who they are and who are unashamedly themselves? I think that must be a positive thing for students who are deciding who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives.”