Profiles in Residential Life: Dani Hove ’20

By Rebecca Goldfine
Residential Life, or more commonly, Res Life, is essential to the Bowdoin community, and plays a big part in making the campus a comfortable place for students to live, study, work, and have fun. Its mission is to make Bowdoin feel like home for every student.

We are occasionally featuring some of the student Res Life staff this year, both to highlight them and their contributions, as well as to show how the program works.


Dani Hove ’20, proctor, first floor Maine Hall

Hove, a computer science and math major, has worked for Res Life since he was a sophomore. Besides his current assisgnment, he's been a proctor for Maine Hall's second floor and Coleman Hall's first floor.

Dani Hove standing on the steps of Maine Hall
Dani Hove ’20 outside Maine Hall, where he is a proctor for the first years living on the first floor.

Keeping an eye out: "Part of my job is to recognize when someone might be feeling shaken up. I get to know of a lot of people's routines, and when a routine shifts, I drill down on why that might have happened. It could have been a busy week, but if it is a bit more serious, it's good to be aware of when it started.

We are trained to effectively connect students to resources and make sure they're aware of the breadth of support that the campus does have."

Mentoring through introspection: "One of the best ways to teach yourself something is to teach it to someone else, to make sure you know the concept well. And Res Life in a lot of ways is kind of teaching Bowdoin, in a sense.

It's put me in a position where I have to feel more comfortable with relaying how my Bowdoin experience has been going, and some of the ways that I’ve managed to succeed at Bowdoin. It's made me inspect what works, what hasn’t worked, and how I can convey that to someone else."

The rewards: "I have always received a lot of mentorship from older students throughout my academic career, and Res Life was a way I could pay that back....It is a very rewarding experience in a lot of ways—it's really rewarding to see the growth of first years as they progress through their college experience.

After you've been at Bowdoin a while, you start to get too accustomed to a lot of things and you don't recognize why something might be fantastic—because you're just so used to it. But being around people who are discovering Bowdoin for the first time can be reinvigorating."


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 (which includes weekly Wednesday night programs in addition to two intensive trainings in August and January). She says the responsibility of each of the seventy-nine students on the Res Life staff is to ensure 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 these barriers, either by helping students one-on-one or pointing them to campus resources. They're trained 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 are feeling belonging and community in residential spaces," Hogan said. "So a lot of our training 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, and 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 in 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 difference and across difference," Hogan said. "They can live their own authentic selves and are also pretty magnetic—people are drawn to them."