Crimson and Gold Connection; Dr. Steve Erwin

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. This week on Crimson and Gold Connection, I'm joined by Dr. Steve Irwin, who's vice president for student life at Pittsburgh State University. Among Dr. Irwin's responsibilities are campus activities, student government, student wellness, campus recreation and intramural sports, dining services, the student centre, and the Bicknell Family Centre for the Arts. One of his other areas of responsibility is student housing. I understand that there has been Dr. Irwin in expansion of the student housing facilities on campus. Yes, that's right. For a number of years, we had been engaged in a process to revitalize our existing student housing, our residence halls, and to expand some additional occupancy to accommodate more students. Each of our existing residence halls received a complete renovation that actually was in its final phase this last summer in time for fall opening. We built a new residence hall, Crimson Commons, that opened in 2010. It's hard to believe it's been that many years now. We also acquired a new family housing complex, Crimson Village in that time, and so we're at an exciting time, I think, in residence halls on campus with all of our facilities now being in really excellent shape.

You perceived there are several advantages in living on campus as opposed to living outside in the town, so to speak. Yes, certainly. We would contend that the opportunity to live on campus has some tremendous benefits. There's certainly the convenience factor living so close to everything that a student would need, library, classrooms, dining hall, all those kinds of things. And essentially having everything taken care of for you in terms of housekeeping, meals, those kinds of things is a great convenience at a time where students are trying to adjust to a new academic setting. So we know that's a real benefit. We also believe that the relationships that students build, whether it's with one another or with the staff and the services that are provided in residence halls, can be a real boost to their collegiate career. We'd always known that students who live in residence halls perform better based on national data, and we had a recent opportunity to see that play out for ourselves as we participated in a retention study that clearly demonstrated that students who live in residence halls are performing at a higher level and are persisting longer at the university. One of the roles which you perform in your capacity as vice president for student life is that of emergency management coordinator. How does that fit in with student life and student housing?

Well, we hope to think that one of the safest places you could live as a college student is on campus and in our residence halls. Not only are they locked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and accessible by key for the residents of that building, but they are staffed by students and and professional staff that are monitoring the environment, able to respond to things quickly, intervene early and often if they see problems developing. Certainly part of a residential campus is to have safe and secure residence halls and it puts a lot of people on campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So some of the issues that you face in the area of emergency management and safety and security don't go away like they might on a campus that is predominantly daytime or evening and has no residential component. But at the same time, placing people here continually puts us in a good position to I think more closely monitor what's going on and know what's going on because of that. And living as we do in Kansas, one of the emergencies that we come across every so often is the weather emergency, particularly as we're now entering the tornado season for 2016.

Yes, as we begin to see weather reports from the National Weather Service, a group of us monitor those and you'll even see us begin to put out notices to people to be mindful of the weather on a particular day if they're calling for the chances of storms, particularly severe storms. And then certainly as things begin to develop, we're able to use our emergency notification system to alert the campus community to any warnings that are issued. And certainly speak from personal experience having been the recipient of several rave alerts about weather related emergencies in particular and could attest to the effectiveness of that and that's something you'll want to see more of the student body actually subscribe to. Sure, one of the things we have an opportunity to do each year is talk to particularly new students and their parents about safety and security on campus during orientation. And subscription to the rave system and being in touch with our learning system is one of the things we really emphasize as we talk with students and their parents. There's a number of things that we focus on that weather is in particular is one of those because we know that really the likelihood of something of an emergency nature happening often centers around weather for us in this part of the country.

Having little earlier Dr. Rowan, there have been a survey done about the benefits of living on campus and its effects on engagement. And you were saying that there are domestic and academic benefits for students who live on campus. Yeah, we are participating in a retention study and effort to improve our retention and one of the portions of that was obviously data gathering. We asked students to tell us some things about their experience on campus and then we did some comparison to data that we actually have about retention and relationship to where students live during their various phases of college. And it did clearly show that students who live in residence halls are persisting and performing at a higher level than those who don't. Part of that we believe is amongst many things the convenience factor but perhaps most importantly is the level of engagement. Research in college student success shows clearly that students who are more engaged in the campus tend to persist and graduate at higher rates.

And it makes sense, college has its ups and downs, there's the high points and there's low points whether it's academically, socially or whatever. If they're more engaged, more connected to one another, more connected to staff, they're more likely to weather particularly the low points. We know that residence halls can be a strong contributor to that just simply because of the connections that they're going to make with one another. Some of the best friends they're going to make only come from that residence hall experience. They're going to make some significant connections to the student staff, the resident assistance on their floor and even the professional staff in the building. So in fact a true social network without necessity for immobiles. It is, it's one of the first social networks certainly well before the electronic version of that. In conclusion, I know that there are a number of our listeners who may not be PSU students themselves but who are the relatives of extended family, parents, grandparents and so on. Who are the family of potential PSU students?

What would you like to say in encouragement to them when considering where to place their offspring child or relative as a student on campus when they're studying here? Well, again, given our data and our experience, we would highly encourage them to take a strong look at residence halls. When touring campus, make sure you get a chance to see our residence halls talk with students and really explore the opportunity to live in our halls and to be a part of that very special community. We know that it does make a difference and we want every student to have that opportunity and chance to do their very best while they're here and we think particularly the best start as a freshman is going to be living in our residence halls. Dr. Steve Irwin, Vice President for Student Life, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. For KRPS and Crimson and Gold Connection, my name is Robert Smith. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.