Dear New Student Affairs Master’s Student

Hopes for your new adventure as a graduate student wanting to work in higher education.

Alex C. Lange
7 min readAug 19, 2019

First and foremost: Welcome and congratulations! Whether you have just finished your Bachelor’s degree or worked for [insert time period] years in this field already, you are about to or have already started to pursue formalized graduate education in our field. We are a field of many names: student affairs, higher education, student personnel, adult and lifelong education, or some combination of those terms (among others)!

As you begin your journey, I want to impart some hopes upon you. These hopes include events, experiences, ponderings, and people I hope you will come in contact with during your time in your master’s program. Many of these are reflections on my learning, on being someone still relatively new to this field (8 years or so), and someone who wants to continue to be a part of a profession that is committed to making higher education better for all who engage with it each day.

I hope you pull from your previous experiences while also learning about new institutions. One of the fascinating parts of being in this field is everyone has “succeeded” in at least one metric — you earned a bachelor’s degree. For some, you attended and worked within a single institution for a given period of time. For others, you have attended and/or worked at multiple institutions. Those experiences are important. At the same time, even if you are attended/worked at the same institution in which you now study, do not let your previous experience define this one. Your master’s degree program opens a different opportunity to study the container we have all invested in (to some degree). So while “we did this at [insert institution name],” learn what the “this” is in your current place while allowing your coursework to expand your horizons even further.

I hope your experiences will be honored, and you will allow yourself to grow in new ones. Given what I said above, take stock of your experiences as a form of knowledge you bring with you each day to your classroom and work experiences. Your experience matters. At the same time, it is only one of the many forms of knowledge you should and will draw upon during your master’s degree journey. If you should happen upon the moments where people seem to be more knowledgable than you, remember the unique lens you bring to the spaces you inhabit. You are there for a reason.

I hope you treat this experience for what it is: a graduate-level learning opportunity. You are working towards a degree a tiny fraction of people in the U.S. and globally go on to earn. It is difficult. There will be a great deal of material to engage with (e.g., articles, books & book chapters, videos) over time. It will be challenging to process it all or get it all done. This is not merely an exercise to earn a credential or a form of finishing school; this is your prime opportunity to test ideas, learn more, and engage in conversations you may never have again on such a consistent, profound basis.

I hope you will prepare for most of your class sessions. This is not to say you need to come to every class perfect in some objective fashion. You will have bad days and nights because you are a human alive in the 21st century. However, graduate school, particularly if you are learning in a face-to-face or synchronous setting, necessitates active engagement. The conversation cannot and should not be shouldered by a few. Prepare in ways that make you feel good about engaging in a discussion for close to three hours. Everyone’s process looks different; find yours and use the classroom space as a way to further your knowledge. Avoid regurgitating what was said in the preparation materials.

I hope you work on your writing and visual communication skills. Not everyone is going to get a PhD., but written communication is so crucial to the continued justification of our work. It has helped me several times when I worked full-time to continue to justify our work, particularly in spaces I could never be in. My writing allowed those higher on the organizational chart to take reports and rationale documents into meetings I would never get to sit in. Simultaneously, visual media continue to be the ways to engage students, among others. I hope you have the chance to learn more about creating infographics and other means to disseminate information beyond flyers (and those are important too!).

I hope you will develop new or firm up existing boundaries. I found masters-level graduate education a thrilling time: so many experiential learning opportunities available to me; all I had to do was say yes. I would come to learn investing in a few different experiences proved more meaningful then spreading myself thin. This allowed people to put demands on my time rather than holding the line as to what I could and could not do. Professionals will also believe they are entitled to overwork you and have you go over agreed-upon hours. This is never okay, and yet I am keenly aware of power dynamics. Having clear boundaries of expectations and time is critical to maintaining your wellness throughout this time.

I hope you find people who will be generous with their time and feedback. I hope you find new people to be honest with you, people who are invested in you yet will not be afraid to tell you when you are wrong. I would not be the professional and scholar I am today if not for some incredible individuals I found during my master’s program. These folks were always in my corner, helped open up possibilities for me, and could also tell me I needed to do better. They stood up for me and helped me negotiate time and boundaries, helped put my learning into action, and always had an open door for me (within reason). These folks showed up for me regularly and consistently in my two-year master’s program experience.

I hope you move away from your experience appreciating theory and practice. As a practice-oriented field, we often evoke theory to the extent it can be immediately applicable to practice. This is vital and important and it undercuts how theory helps us notice the world in different ways. I hope your espousing of a theory is not limited to student development; we learn many theories in our field, but we often use that word for a specific section of our work.

I hope your experience is fruitful (and that you at some point have a lousy supervisor if you already haven’t). Supervision, I have found, often makes or breaks one’s experience in this field. At the same time, I have learned more about navigating the student affairs profession by having both sets of supervision. Good and bad supervisors taught me what I want to do more of, how much work proper supervision takes, and how it has an effect on one’s experience beyond the working hours of whatever your 9-to-5 looks like. Our work should never be our entire lives — and yet, it can affect every hour of our day if we are not careful.

I hope you examine the ways systems bestow privilege and access to you based on your social and personal identities. I similarly want you to explore how these same systems may deny you these affordances. It is not enough to name or check your privilege; I want you to explore what it means, how it shows up, and what you then do with it continuously in your work. And always keep in mind this is lifelong, ongoing work; as oppression evolves and changes, so must our learning about it.

I hope you have meaningful conversations about diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion across courses, not just in one. If you are not already aware, our profession stresses ten areas of competencies all student affairs professionals should work towards developing. I am always suspicious when it comes to our treatment of the Social Justice and Inclusion competency. After all, the competencies of our field are meant to be integrative not separated. While we need courses that explicitly focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, we also need them to be meaningful conversations across classes, not limited to single diversity additions to a course here or there.

I hope you will give your experience the space of what it will be. Sometimes, this means not having it be what we want, but what we need. Not having it be all warmth and accolades, but failures as well. Sometimes, this means that everything will not click for us at the moment we learn it. You will be frustrated that everything cannot be distilled from theory to practice with a snap of a finger or an immediate translation from faculty members. Becoming an educator means swallowing the same pills as the students we engage: there are reasons we do not automatically give students answers to everything — why would you expect anything different?

Finally, I hope you have discerning conversations about your present and future. So many of our discussions during our masters-level experience concern the functional area or institutional type we want to work within. Rarely do these conversations include the topics in higher education that most animate us and how we can leverage our skills and talents to best move us and postsecondary education to better places, including working outside of higher education. Yes, talk about the functional area and institutional type. Talk about your desires for a job or your next level of education. And spend time investing in how we make postsecondary education better for a more significant number of people from wherever one winds up. This is what we need so much more of in our field.

Welcome colleague. May these hopes help you wade through and create your path in this field.

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Alex C. Lange

most times, i write about teaching and learning in higher education. some times, i write about current events or other topics of interest to me.