Celebrating the student servants we call Baylor Community Leaders
When you were an 18-year-old on the brink of adulthood and headed to college, what worries did you have? Were you afraid you wouldn’t make any friends? Scared you’d get lost on the first day? Just trying to wrap your head around the fact that you were more or less on your own and had to embrace “adulting”?
All these fears are the exact reasons why Baylor Community Leaders (CLs) exist. (If it’s been awhile since you graduated from Baylor, you may remember these folks as RAs.) Every wing of every Baylor residence hall has an upperclassman who volunteers countless hours to serve as the resident CL — there to be a friend, a confidant, a mentor and a help to the students on their hall.
As you can imagine, with such a high percentage of Baylor’s on-campus residents being freshmen, a lot of their time is spent helping with that adjustment to college — helping new students get used to navigating campus, teaching how to use the on-campus laundry rooms, helping them draft emails to professors for the first time, and encouraging them to get out of their dorm room (AKA their comfort zone) and get involved on campus.
Because of everything these CLs do for our students, Baylor has an annual CL Appreciation Week. As part of our #BearsOfBaylor series, we took some time last week to talk to some of these students who have been giving back to the Baylor family in the best way they know how:
“I loved what was offered to me by my own CLs, and I really truly wanted to be able to offer the same sense of community I got to other people and be there for them throughout whatever they needed with an offer of community that just had no judgement, where they could be whatever they wanted to be.”
“I’m really interested in pursuing ministry, and so I thought [being a CL] was a good opportunity to do that in a way that’s a lot different than practical ministry opportunities. I was super impacted by my CL my freshman year; I lived in Martin. And I wanted to be a part of the experience freshman guys have from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. I wanted to be a part of that process, just like my CL was for me.“
“I have a huge, massive heart for people, and I just think that’s something that has grown in this job. … And now I have the privilege of taking care of all of these people. Not like mothering them, but more along the lines of helping them to love themselves, in whatever capacity that looks like.”
“I transferred to Baylor after my freshman year. I went to the University of Oregon, and my RA there was just very absent from the hall… When I came here, there was such an immediate difference with my CL from the very first day. That made the world of difference for me, coming to Texas for the first time away from home. If I could be that for someone else — that’s what I wanted to do.”
“I just wanted to help people. Going through my freshman year and seeing my CL and all the ways he was able to incorporate every single guy on my hall and get everyone involved together and help everyone find their niche on campus, I was like, ‘That’s just amazing.’ … I really want my guys to find their meaning and their purpose, both at Baylor and in their lives, on a really small scale and a really broad scale. I can see so much potential in all of them.”
Sic ’em, Community Leaders!
You might also like:
*What’s it like to have a professor living in your dorm? (Oct. 2016)
*Top 10 words of wisdom from alumni for Baylor freshmen (Aug. 2015)