In the SSFS Westview Dorm, all students are required to contribute to the community by doing some jobs or chores. The types of dorm jobs are dish crew, dinner table cleaning in the dining hall, and cleaning different public places in the dorm. With the dormitory RAs’ help, most of the students do their jobs one week per month when it is their turn to do jobs. For most types of jobs, students in groups of two collaborate and work together to finish the jobs. The dorm jobs make students participate in the community. “It is all students’ duty to keep our dorm clean,” said a dorm student. Doing dorm jobs is a great way to communicate and to create a clean environment.

Most of the time, students can do all the work responsibly. However, some students don’t want to do the jobs, so they hide from the jobs. Dish crew is one of the jobs that some students dislike the most, because the dish crew is a lengthy process of washing dishes. Also, when one does the dish crew job, one needs to take a long time to wait for other people to finish the dinner and give them the dishes. People may be stressed when they need to do dish crew on their busy days. Sometimes, dorm jobs can be inefficient, especially for the jobs which are cleaning the public spaces. Once, when a student finished the upper lounge cleaning jobs, there were students who came and messed it up again, so that she needed to do all things again. The student claimed that it would be helpful if we can reduce the number of people to come after one cleans the dorm public spaces. The other comment from the student is that people who have the same jobs may do work unequally if they come to the working space at different times. I claim that we should develop a system splitting the work in more specific pieces.

Also, to make sure everyone will participate, my advice is to gather all the students who do dorm jobs together and to complete the chores at the same time. At the same time, we can change the way to group job crews. Instead of dividing people by dorm staffs or RAs, we can let students choose their partners to work with if they want to. Working with familiar friends may promote student attitudes toward participating. However, with the goal of communication in mind, we can also make one student join in the two partner groups and form a three people group. Everyone should take turns becoming that student and this might become a way of getting to know more people. In this case, we can make sure students are happy working with friends and get a chance to meet new friends, and since this is taking turns, there will not be students who have a long-term difficult experience that cannot be in the community and talk to other people in groups. Another thing that can keep students willing to complete the job is limiting the working time. Students may get bored doing jobs for a long time and get a feeling of unfairness. For some students, especially for those who have activities after school, they cannot find too much time for dorm jobs either. I think if we can limit the working time up to 20 minutes and release students on time, the willing participation will increase as students consider the jobs fair and acceptable.

As we find effective ways to structure dorm jobs, the student engagement and investment in taking care of our campus and home will increase. The high engagement provides a sense of belonging to students, which better achieves our school value of community.