How It All Began...

This is the beginning of the original email...

Friends –

Monday was a lovely, sunny day in St. Paul, Minnesota…I wasn’t near a computer or a TV all day (thanks to a daunting statistics test and then a trip to the quilt store to steady my nerves)…you can only imagine the shock and sadness I experienced when coming home at 4:30pm to hear the stories about the horrific occurrences at Virginia Tech University. I’m sure you all experienced similar emotions…events like this seem impossible to comprehend. After I got through watching the news and reading various accounts on the internet, I felt overwhelmed…my heart was, and still is, just aching for that campus community.

Maybe it’s from all the time in student development…maybe it’s from too many higher education classes, but I found my mind racing…what is it like to be an administrator there today? To be the president? To be the campus security office? To be a faculty member? Mostly, I wondered what it was like to be a student on that campus…more specifically, what is it like to be an RA at Virginia Tech right now? Maybe it’s because my journey into the wonderful world of studying and working in academia started in residence life, but my heart really goes out to the RAs today. I know there are a ton of people struggling to make sense of this tragedy, and I know there are a ton of people striving to hold things together for the good of the entire campus…I salute all those people and wish there was something I could do for everyone…but I know that I can’t help everyone. So I guess my natural inclination is to do something for the RAs. Those students, in addition to dealing with their own grief and fear, will be spending the last few weeks of the semester helping others more than ever before. I guess I’m hoping there’s a little something that we can do to offer just a tiny bit of solace to those RAs.

I just want to help and I don’t really know what I can do…but I feel like we could do this…

Here’s the idea…trite and inconsequential as it may seem…little RA Care Packages. One for every RA and Hall Director in every residence hall at Virginia Tech. Imagine brown paper lunch sacks filled with microwave popcorn, granola bars, candy and such…tied with Hokie-colored ribbons (orange and maroon)…sent in boxes to each residence hall on the Virginia State campus.

The rest of the email has basically been broken down into other sections of the blog. We just wanted to share the rambling that got VT Prosim started...