By Margaret Allen

The Office of Student Affairs will have to spend a significant amount of time to find new staff after the decisions of Resident Life Coordinators (RLC) Katie Lau and Eric Vos to step down from their positions at the end of this academic year.
Student Affairs looks toward the hiring process with optimism. After last year’s large RLC turnover, the department changed their hiring strategy significantly.

“We began to look for candidates who attended peer institutions…people who would be more specifically interested in Grinnell,” said Dean of Students Travis Greene.

A third RLC will be hired for Clangrala. This position was eliminated last year, but will be brought back to alleviate the burden of supervising both the Canada and Clangrala. Without this separation, a single RLC would have to vie for close to 450 students.

Preliminary screening for replacement staff will begin this month, and a selective pool of qualified applicants will be invited to campus in April. At that time, students will have the ability to get involved in the selection process by meeting with the candidates in social settings.
“Once student involvement kicks in, we’ll narrow down the candidates and hopefully find a great match,” Greene said.

Lau, RLC to both Canada and Clangrala, decided to leave Grinnell after two-and-a-half years to spend more time with her family in Wisconsin. Though she will miss the less restrictive supervisory style of Grinnell, she won’t miss the high stress of being on-call during the weekend.

“Sometimes you’d get a call about someone’s room flooding, and the next time it would be a student who needed to go to the hospital,” Lau said. “It was incredibly variable.”

Many students will miss Lau’s flexibility in times of need.

“She had a reputation for being incredibly accommodating, and certainly lived up to it,” said Alana Vogel ’12.
Lau plans to continue working with students at the college level upon her return to Wisconsin, taking with her the skills that she acquired while serving as the RLC for seven residence halls.

Jamaland RLC Eric Vos has also decided to leave Grinnell after one year of employment, to join his fiancé in Vermont. Though he plans to marry in the summer, leaving Grinnell wasn’t an easy decision for Vos.

“I really liked this place and would have stayed… but ultimately it was a personal decision that I had to make,” Vos said. “Grinnell is the most socially-minded and welcoming place I’ve ever been associated with.”

Like Lau, Vos hopes to continue working with students in upper education in his new location.