Get to Know Your RD: Johnny Hinton

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Media by Songen Miao

Dorm life is an essential part of the full experience of campus life. It promotes communication and relationships between students along with providing a place where students can relax after class. With dozens or even hundreds of students living in one building, there must be a need for an administrator. At Greenville University, every building has a Residence Director, RD, for short. Every RD needs to be aware of the current problems of the whole building and help the students to solve them. To better understand an RD, I interviewed Johnny Hinton, who is the RD of Hood Hall at Greenville University. Hinton graduated from GU in 2018, and is now working for his master’s in higher education through Geneva College in Pennsylvania.

Source: Johnny Hinton/ Media by Songen Miao

When I asked him why he wanted to be an RD, Johnny replied, “I chose to become an RD because I care about student development, personal growth, and education a lot. I like hanging out with students, but I also like to watch students go through hard times, fun times, and challenging times. These are all the things I want to do and the reason why I became RD.”

Source: Songen Miao

One of Johnny’s favorite things about Hood is that everyone who lives there is very different. “We can have women on the first floor and men on the second and third floor. We can have transfer students on different levels; we can also have freshmen students; we can have soccer players and musicians all in the same building. So it creates a really cool community of people who wouldn’t regularly see each other at all or even on a regular basis, and binds friendships together to make a fantastic community. That’s my favorite part about being in Hood,” Hinton says.

This semester will be Hinton’s third semester as an RD. When asked how he has grown as an individual, he said he had changed a lot during this job. “My first semester was a lot of learning. There was a lot of basic stuff, such as getting to know the job, getting to know the people, and how to do well. The only way I was able to do that well was by listening to other people’s feedback and talking to students to see what their thoughts were on different things. My first year was very challenging for me. In the second year, I knew what I did well in the first year, and that I can always keep improving on these things to make them better. This semester, I can do a lot of things better than before and help students solve problems faster than the previous two semesters.” Hinton said.

We should all spend some time getting to know our RD. They are contributing to the whole dormitory building, and making the on-campus living experiences the best they can be. I encourage you to take the opportunity to find the RD of your building and get to know them better.

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