Alex Gates ’22 is one of nine proctors living with sophomores in one of Bowdoin's nine College Houses, whose residents are responsible for organizing many social, cultural, and intellectual events for the campus community.
This profile is part of a series on students who work for Res Life.
Alex Gates ’22, Howell House proctor
Gates is planning to declare an environmental studies and earth and oceanographic science major, with a focus on climate and the ocean. As a College House proctor, he's living with twenty-six of his fellow sophomores.
The job that inspired him to be a proctor: "For the past ten years, I've gone to the same summer camp, Camp Bishopswood, near Camden, Maine. For the last three summers, I've worked there as a counselor and I've loved the job with my whole heart. It is my favorite thing to do, and I saw Res Life as a continuation of that. College students and ten- to twelve-year-old boys are not that different in many regards! I felt it was something I wanted to do, and that it was a way I could do good—I could better my school."
Favorite moment so far? "Last weekend on Friday night ten of us came down to the living room and played board games. We played for four hours straight on a Friday night. I had never played any of them before. We played Coup and there was one with werewolves—it was really great."
How do you anticipate working for Res Life changing you? "Res Life forces you into situations that you normally wouldn't be comfortable with. It pushes you out of your comfort zone—not too much, but enough to learn."
What do you share with the other seventy-seven students working for Res Life? "I don't know if I can explain it. I look around at Res Life meetings, and we all have something in common, I can't quite put my finger on it. There's definitely some common trait we all have. We're obviously very different, with different backgrounds, but there is one key quality we all have and it's very important. Maybe empathy in some way."
A bit of background on Residential Life's student program
As director of residential education, Whitney Hogan ’07 oversees all the training for her corps of student employees—instruction that includes weekly Wednesday night programs in addition to two intensive sessions in August and January. She says the responsibility of each of the seventy-nine students on the Res Life staff is to ensure that every student feels a place of belonging at Bowdoin.
"In the first-year spaces, we're focused on thinking about all of the things that get in the way of making Bowdoin feel like home for someone," she said. "Is it homesickness, is it adjusting to the social scene, is it finding community in the residential hall or outside the residential hall, is it navigating a mental health issue, or figuring out gender expression?"
Res Life staff are trained to remove those barriers, either by helping students one-on-one or pointing them to campus resources. They're taught to address mental and physical health issues and alcohol and drug use—as well as work with diversity and difference.
"We're doing crisis response and making sure people are safe and supported, but we're also thinking critically about how we can make sure people feel a sense of belonging and community in residential spaces," Hogan said. "So a lot of our focus is on inclusion, diversity, and difference, and making sure we're meeting the needs of all students."
There are several types of Res Life staff positions: first-year proctors, residential advisors (RAs), College House proctors, head proctors, and head RAs. All are relatively well-paid campus jobs that are awarded, in a competitive application process, to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. (It's common for over 100 students to apply for about thirty new positions every year.)
Each of the thirty-five floors that comprise the eight first-year residential halls has a proctor who lives in a single on the floor. Additionally, these proctors collaborate with an affiliated RA who lives elsewhere but helps out with dorm programs. In their own dorms, RAs also focus on building cohesive communities. College House proctors live in one of Bowdoin's nine College Houses.
"The common denominator across all people on staff is they believe Bowdoin is a place where everyone can belong. The biggest set of skills are softer leadership skills—how to communicate about differences and across differences," Hogan said. "They can live their own authentic selves and are also pretty magnetic—people are drawn to them."
