Housing and Residence Life has selected the majority of its resident advisor staff for the 2017-18 school year. Of the approximately 360 candidates who applied for first-year and upperclassmen RA positions, 92 have been hired so far.
HRL Assistant Dean of Students Andrew Petters said in an email to The Cavalier Daily that the selection process is not yet complete. Although the majority of the staff has been hired, Petters said HRL will be making additional offers to candidates in the future.
Although only about 26 percent of applicants were selected for the position, Allie Piacenti, vice chair for RA selection, said in an email statement the process was no more competitive than it has been in previous years.
“The process featured a written application, an individual interview and a group interview like in years prior,” Piacenti said. “No changes were designed to make the process either more or less competitive, but rather, to ensure candidates were being assessed in the most holistic way possible.”
Of the 92 selected RAs, 52 are women and 40 are men.
As students get older, there are fewer RAs represented for each class. Fifty percent are rising second-years and a little over 40 percent are rising third-years. There are very few rising fourth- and fifth-years who will be in RA positions, with eight students and one student from those class years, respectively.
Students from the College comprise an overwhelming majority of the staff at 73.9 percent. The Engineering School has the second largest percentage of RAs with 17.4 percent. There are eight students from the Curry School, Batten School, Commerce School and Nursing School combined.
Petters said they analyzed the demographic data of the newly-selected RAs to compare their demographics to the overall University.
“For example, we have a higher percentage of African American and Hispanic students hired as new RAs than the University percentage of enrolled students, versus a lower percentage of White students and comparable percentage of Asian students,” Petters said.
African-American students make up 16.3 percent of the RA staff while Hispanic students make up 8.7 percent. Only 6.3 percent of the University’s undergraduate student body identifies as African-American and 6.2 percent is Hispanic.
White RAs makeup 56.5 percent of students hired as compared to the overall University population, of which 59.2 percent of undergraduates are white. Twelve percent of the RA staff are Asian students — similarly, about 13 percent of undergraduates are Asian.
In terms of changes that will affect where RAs are placed, dorm associations will be organized in a slightly different way for the next school year, as the Kent-Dabney and Bonnycastle dorms will be closed for renovations.
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