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Date Collected

Fall 2018

Place item was collected

Logan, UT

Informant

Catie Giraldes

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Catie Giraldes is 20 years old, an Aries, and originally from Colorado. This is her third year as a Resident Assistant in Snow Hall. She is an Integrated Studies major, and she volunteers a lot. She volunteers with Crisis Text Line online and with the Family Place and CAPSA (Community Abuse Prevention Service Agency) in Cache Valley. She is also a peer educator at the university for SAAVI.

Context

After I asked Catie about how she felt going through Behind Closed Doors as a new Resident Assistant, I asked her about her two times as being an actor. She was in the process of cleaning cupboards and putting things back into the cupboard. Our interview was interrupted 3 times by residents coming up to the desk to ask for help with the mail or plans for the summer. Catie was super good natured about the interruptions and her work. We sat on the floor for this interview. Behind Closed Doors is an event set up at the very end of fall training for resident assistants. It is a full building of rounds with incidences on every floor. Returning RAs are actors in these incidences with the intent to coach and help new RAs when they might struggle and to coach them through what they should do in any of these situations.

Text

So I took being an actor probably more seriously than I should have. I’m just, because for me, it’s still an opportunity. People actually get to try this with it being a risk-free environment. Because I remember, my first year was really intense with incidents. And so I wanted to make sure people got both, uh, the best case and the worst case. Um, so like, for people, I was worried that like, they were going to get read wrong. I might have been a bit harsher. And it was just a very fun experience. Like pulling in your own kind of traumatic experiences into like, this productive way.

Like I got to use the line that my very first quiet hours violation used on me, which was that a 0102 f off, was their A number. So that was fun. But yeah, and then my other one, I was dealing with a stalking incident and I just felt like it was like, very important to do long debrief. People all have like, the same exact mistakes of like blocking doorways and stuff like that. It’d be like dude, if somebody is being stalked, you don’t want them to be feeling like they’re trapped in this room with you. Like that’s the last thing you want from them. So I think I took that more seriously than I took the going through as a newbie. Which is saying something cause I’m kind of a perfectionist. Um, but yeah, awesome.

Texture

Catie was turning to face me more because she was putting things away. She’d pause moving and talking to pick the perfect words to mean what she wanted to say. Catie is usually a bright and bubbly person to interact with, but she was sick today and so she was more reserved. She also sobers when talking about the serious aspects of the resident assistant position. Her voice got very even, and she didn’t pause as much, but when she did it was for longer. She also used these pauses to push her glasses back up her nose.

Course

ENGL 2210

Instructor

Dr. Lynne McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Occupation/Avocation

EAD Number

3.8.11.4

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