Running head: NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 1

Narrative Description

Dominic L. Hoare Evans

Loyola University Chicago

NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 2

Narrative Description

These last two years have been an incredible journey for me, where I have learned a great

deal about the field of higher education, both through the Loyola program as well as through my

graduate assistantship and internship, both were at Northwestern University. Along with the

amazing knowledge that I have learned through those experiences, I have also developed and

grown as a student affairs professional and as an individual. Throughout this period of my life I

have also gained a deeper insight into social justice issues surrounding not only the world of

higher education but also issues within the United States. Overall this program has guided me

through a wonderful, enriching learning experience, where I know that I will be able to take all

of the knowledge and skills learned throughout the last two years and work within higher

education through a continuous social justice lens.

The Loyola higher education program has guided me through fifteen different courses

ranging from the history, theory, identity, assessment and organization of the field. Throughout

this program I have learned a great deal about the field of higher education as well as the

population that we serve through a social justice lens. When reflecting back over the course that I

took, the main areas of growth for me have been around identity, assessment and theory. One of

the first courses that I took was multiculturalism, throughout this course we dissected many

difference identities and learned how they were defined, how they are often mistaken, as well as

how we can support these different identities within higher education. Along with the knowledge

around these identities, I also gained great dialogue skills, where each week we would participate

within a dialogue as well as facilitate one. Because of this experience I have been able to

facilitate conversations around not only identity but also many other hard topics with students

currently enrolled in higher education. Evaluation in higher education is another course where I
NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 3

learned a great amount. Throughout this course we were tasked with writing up an evaluation

proposal for a co-curricular activity within higher education. This course taught me the process,

language, and importance of evaluation within higher education. Where due to accreditation and

budgeting, it is vitally important that we evaluate the work we do and show continuous

improvements for our learning opportunities outside of the classroom. This course was also very

close to me because of the amount of assessment that went into my graduate assistantship role.

The final courses which had the greatest impact on me, were all the courses surrounding theory.

These course were really important to me because they gave me the theory behind the work we

currently do as well as how to frame future work that we will do. Through these course we were

able to deconstruct and reconstruct theories and programing based off of the theory. Learning

about the different theories also supported a lot of the assessment work which I did, where I was

able to identify the theory behind the co-curricular programing as well as bring in new theory to

try and continuously improve our programing. Overall I learned a lot from every one of my

courses, these three mentioned above definitely had the greatest impact on me, but I take

knowledge from all of the courses and can see how they will impact my future role as a student

affairs professional.

Over the last two years I have worked as the graduate assistant for operations and

assessment through the student union at Northwestern University. Through this experience I

have learned a great deal about what it is like to be a student affairs professional especially

through the student union. One of the biggest responsibilities that I had was to assess the student

learning of student employees that work in the student union. Through this experience I have

been able to learn how to develop, assess and evaluate student employees through multiple

different assessment methods. I have been involved with a longitudinal study which involved
NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 4

both qualitative and quantitative data, through this process I developed both survey skills as well

as interview skills. Within this process I also learned how to collect and evaluate data, as well as

how best to share the data with the community so that continuous improvements could be made

for our student employment experience. Along with the multiple assessment projects that I

worked on, I also learned a great deal about how to supervise students. Another one of my main

roles is to supervise a student development manager. Within this role I was able to learn how to

best supervise, grow and develop this position. Much of my previous experience had been

around supervising adults, so by being able to gain a greater insight into supervising students, I

have learned a lot about the balance that it takes, where they are students first and employees

second. Along with my role as the graduate assistant within the student union, I also worked as

an intern for the Vice President of Student Affairs. This experience was a great opportunity for

me where I was able to learn about the role of a student affairs professional who had been in the

field for many years and worked within a higher position that many of the entry level associates I

had worked with previously. Through this position I learned about the day to day operations that

went into a vice presidents role but was also given the opportunity to work on my own

professional development through shadowing different functional areas as well as bring back a

program which had previously been postponed. Through the development of this program, which

was run through Religious and Spiritual Life, I was able to learn about how to develop a

program, run and facilitate the program, as well as assess the program for continuous

improvement. Overall the greatest skill I got from this experience was the hands on practice of

facilitating a dialogue around topics of belief, which are very different for every person involved.

Through both of these professional experiences I have learned a lot about what it takes to be a

student affairs professional and am looking forward to making it a full time role.
NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 5

Reflecting back on the courses I have taken as well as the professional practice I have

gotten over the last two years, I can see how I have developed as a person as well as a student

affairs professional. Coming into this program I had previously worked as a social worker and

was wanting a slight change in career but something that also fought for social justice issues.

This program has been a perfect fit for me where I have been able to dive deeper into these social

justice issues, but rather than through a social work lens it has been through a higher education

lens. The program has taught me how to identity, and dissect different social justice issues and

how to have my own opinion on these issues with critical evidence. Along with this, the program

has helped me identify a core passion of mine, which is to work with students with disabilities.

As a student with an invisible disability, I have often been quit secretive about it, and not wanted

to identify as a student with a disability. But very quickly this program brought it out in me. I

learned the importance of advocacy and mentorship, and how we need more student affairs

professionals to come out and be proud of their disability, if not for their own selves but for the

many students who may also be going through similar struggles. With this in mind, the greatest

thing I have learned about myself, which also connects to how I will incorporate social justice

into my future work, is to treat people how they want to be treated, not how you want to be

treated, and if you don’t know, then ask. Every individual has different identities and factors that

contribute to their lens on life and how they want to be treated as they go through it. As student

affairs professionals we need to be aware of this and make sure that we are telling our students

how we identify and want to be treated, but also we need to make sure that we are asking our

students the same question and in the cases where they are still figuring it out, we need to be

supporting them through that exploration. Overall these last two years have been an amazing

learning opportunity for me and I cannot wait to enter the field of higher education, hopefully
NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION 6

working with students with disabilities and continuously assessing their experiences so that I can

create change and make them the greatest that they can be.