LLC Interview

I sat down with Dr. William Parker, the Director and Coordinator of the Exploratory LLC located in Bryan Hall.

R- Which LLC do you work with?

P- Exploratory/Those looking to explore their major- Bryan Hall

R- What is your role in working with the LLC?

P- (laughs) Oh, I do a little bit of everything, like I help acquire the classes because we teach, starting next year, we’ll be teaching seven different liberal studies class sections per semester in the hall. And so, it’s my job to go out and get those sections, try to get a diverse group of classes, you know some e-series or IFS classes, along with the things I think the students are going to need in their schedules so that they won’t basically be taking courses that they wouldn’t be interested in taking. So, I acquire those, I set them up, I also have an associate director and a graduate assistant who works with us and the three of us go about selecting each year’s applicants, from the hordes of people who apply. That’s based on reading essays and answering students’ questions and trying to figure out, based on those, who fits our profile of being a student interested in exploring things. But other than that, I for instance, about once a month I have an event over in the hall called “Cookies and Complaints” where I set out trays of cookies and anyone who wants to drop by and have a cookie, they have to make a comment about either something they don’t like or something they do like, it’s how we get feedback. Then, let’s see, Tuesday of last week, we did Taco Tuesday with Karaoke. So the associate director and I spent about an hour cooking all of the fixings for tacos, spread that out in the lobby, set up karaoke equipment, and it sort of gave us a chance for students to blow off some steam, to chat with us, to develop a sense of community. That’s the whole point of a Living Learning Community is that students learn from each other and to get that going we have to help maintain this sense of “we’re a community of friends” and that these are the people that you can sit down with and just discuss anything. So, we need social activities to develop that. I also recruit mentors, who are, these are faculty or staff members who shadow students during the spring in topics that they are interested in. We’ve got one on marketing and branding where students learn to market and brand things. We’ve got one about University athletics, where students get to visit and talk to the people in charge of different types of athletics on campus. So it’s sort of an involvement, and I help set those kinds of things up.

R- What is the structure of this LLC? I know you said you have to take specific classes, are their colloquiums.

P- Yes, we have a fall colloquium, which focuses at one, it alternates between having large lectures with all 128 members of the learning community, wherein we discuss study abroad we bring in the directors of big study abroad programs. They give presentations to students; and we have people come in and talk about study skills, people who talk about stress, how to manage stress, people who come in and talk about academic dishonesty and the kinds of topics that people really need to know something about. We also get Mark Ziegler to come in and give one of his “rah rah” speeches about “What’s it like to be a Seminole?” speeches, those are especially popular. But then we alternate those with small breakout classes where students are paired with an advisor, who is a professional advisor on campus, and some sophomores who were members of the community the previous year, and we go through things like personality evaluations, we look at the goals, interests, skills, we look at majors and how to explore majors and important things to ask and how to access the information, what are things about a major that you hadn’t thought of, we explore careers, we do a field trip to the Career Center to show them everything that’s there, and to plan ahead. Plan your next semester. Plan your next year, what kind of things do you want to accomplish and what are you going to have to do to accomplish those things? So those are all activities that are useful for most students but certainly more focused towards the exploratory students. Then there’s one of the seven sections of liberal studies courses in fall and then there’s one of seven in spring, there’s no colloquium in the spring.

R- okay.

R-How long have you been working with LLC students?

P- I think this is my fifth year. I sort of stumbled into it. I heard about it six or seven years ago and… I have a daughter who currently in a PhD program out on the west coast. When she was thinking about going to college as an undergraduate, she could have gotten into FSU, but she didn’t want to go to FSU. 1.) Because it was in the South. At that time she thought that being a Southerner was somehow passé, (laughs). She has since then discovered that being a girl from the south is fantastic. Her accent is really deep, you wouldn’t believe it.

R- Oh really?

P- Yeah she’s a semiprofessional performer in Southern California and her stage name is Miss Magnolia. So yeah, initially she didn’t want to be in the south and she didn’t want to go to a large university. She felt that it would be difficult to get a personal feel, so she went to a small, very expensive liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.

R- Oh really where?

P- Dickinson

R- Okay, I’ve heard of Dickinson. I’m from Pennsylvania.

P- Where?

R- I’m from a suburb of Pittsburgh.

P- Oh okay, my wife lived in Pittsburgh for a while, my mother’s family is from Philadelphia. We used to drive up and visit several times per year, love Pennsylvania. So yeah she went up there, and after she had left, one of my colleagues had come up to me and said “Have you heard about these things called Learning Communities, and no I hadn’t. He said they’re an attempt to produce a small, sort of a surrogate of a European residential college. If you go to, say Oxford, you actually are not in Oxford, you’re in a college which is in Oxford where you live with the same people and you take classes with the same people and it makes the university seem manageable and small. He said, “yeah we have the same things we have these learning communities.” I said that sounds like a great idea, I wish they would have been around when my daughter went through it, maybe they were. You know I really like this, I’d like to get involved. Maybe I could teach a class or help out or something, and he said go talk to the guy in charge which at the time was Dennis Moore from English. I talked to Dennis and yeah I heard about this and I really would like to get involved and said “Good we need a director.” I said no, no, no, no I want to start off small, “we don’t need small, we need a director.” So I talked to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and said “Look, I have no administrative skills, I am just scared to death of this idea of being a director, it’s just not in my future. But at that point Dennis needed to go back into a full teaching role and they didn’t have anyone else really until you can find someone who’s really suited.” That was 5 years ago. So far, I don’t think they’re looking. I need to remind them that I’m going to be retiring in a few years, you’re going to have to start looking. Yeah, I’ve found plenty of very talented people, who have those administrative skills that I lack. I’ve teamed with them and let them handle the administration and I handle the stuff I’m good at which is dealing with classes, dealing with students, coming up with grandiose ideas that we can try and I let the administrative tell me if it’s possible.

R- So, I know you said that there are second year students that act as advisors, as well as assigned advisors, are you or do you consider yourself an advisor to the students in the LLC?

P- Well, I was trained and have for many years operated as an academic advisor in geology. So I have some experience, but to be honest I have not been as active as an advisor in geology over the past few years. So with a lot of the new things that come along I’m kinda out of touch with those things, but I can certainly give them some perspective from having been an advisor in a science program and recommend such things as “find a faculty member and go talk to them.” That’s how you really find out what’s going on in the department. You know, find the social arm of the department, and start tagging along, become a member, go to the parties, go to the talks, go to the outings, that’s how you’ll find out what the students are like. The fact that faculty aren’t scary. Faculty really enjoy talking to students or otherwise we wouldn’t have these jobs. You know the idea of setting up an appointment, because most of us are busy, but really love to sit down and talk to students. You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised the average freshman would be like “oh, professors are scary!”

R- Oh yeah absolutely, absolutely.

R- If so, do you see that participation in the LLC promotes healthy competition between like-minded people?

P- Competition?

R- In other words, this is probably geared towards LLCs that have dedicated majors like a Music or a STEM, but would you see healthy academic competition. If you see one is performing better than the others do the rest of them get better and catch up.

P- I don’t think it’s so much competition that it is… it’s an essential environment of student assistance because everybody lives together and they take classes together and they get to know eachother very well, and it’s not uncommon to find one student tutoring another student who lives in the same hall, because they’re friends or they meet occaisionally and I happen to know that this person is very good at this thing. So it’s not so much competition as it is helpful assistance. I think I see a lot of that. That’s a very important part of developing this community structure, whether it’s a friendly competition or whether it’s an offer of assistance, peer to peer learning is so important. I think it is highly unrecognized, the students who are living off campus are missing so much of an opportunity for the peer to peer interaction. At the end of the day, “I’m in a hurry to get home” or “I can turn on the xbox or watch Netflix, fix my dinner et cetera.” Yeah, but, when you’re home, you’re probably not with anyone that you know that well and certainly no one who is in any of your classes. You can’t ask them the rare question, “Did you understand this part of the lecture?” See, I was a commuting student when I was an undergraduate. I went to classes, hit the books and went home. Came back the next day, that was it. My daughter, because she is living away from home and living in a dorm, got to hang out with the students she was in classes with. I lived through her, vicariously, what it would have been like to live on campus. I realized how valuable that is. I was missing so much as an undergraduate.

R- My mom says the same thing because she was a commuting student as well at the University of Pittsburgh and she says all the time “Oh if I could go back I would definitely go and live on campus housing absolutely.”

Note: This is a partial transcription of the interview. 14 min of 35 min has been transcribed and posted to this blog.