Stages and Bays

[Adam Ross]

Working in the academic skills center, I come across a relatively wide range of identity statuses from students. I would say most of my students have generally resolved their crises of Industry vs Inferiority, but everyone seems to vary from day to day. I think teenage mood swings make it difficult to judge psychosocial development because they make people doubt resolutions to things they had otherwise figured out. They doubt their basic study skills sometimes when they are doing work, and all I seem to need to do is affirm them by telling them that they are doing well and they should just keep going. Some students are in the Identity vs Role Confusion stage, and I can tell because of the bold statements that they make during conversations. The students that people seem to find the most charming generally say things that are honest and relatable, but I can tell that other students are imitating other people when they use slang when they’re talking to tutors, or randomly start political debates.

Overall, this is not the majority and I’m generally impressed by the maturity of the students. There was a student I had a conversation with on the first day who seemed to have her whole life figured out, but only for the next couple of years which I interpret as a good sign of identity achievement. Her biggest crisis was that she was not getting enough sleep, and the cause was that she was a serious student who wanted to maintain straight As in her classes but she also had a part-time job at which she had made a lot of money and wanted to continue to do so. Her resolution was to quit her job; she wasn’t spending very much money and therefore didn’t need the money in the short term. I think something key that differentiates her achievement from default is that she only told me her plan as far as it made sense. She wanted to do well in high school and move out afterwards and that was why she was saving up money. I got a different impression from talking with a student who may have been more defaulted, and told me the plan he had made for himself to become a firefighter in Colorado, but doesn’t usually seem to be engaging with his classwork. Sometimes they also talk about their relationships, but it is difficult to tell how superficial vs how intimate these are because they do not talk about them in that much detail while in school. I’d say this is a hard crisis to judge their progress in for these reasons. I think that the Academic Support Center’s model of developing healthy relationships with the students is a great way to foster healthy development that will affirm the students’ progress in these crises.

At their stage, I would have told someone “I’m working as hard as I can in school and putting lots of time into my Astronomy research in the hopes that those two things plus my test scores will grant me admission into a great physics program” which was a way to default on my academic crisis of not being sure if I wanted to study physics. I’d say throughout college, I went from default to moratorium on the academic crisis, the political crisis (in high school I was an Eco socialist, now IDFK but I’m probably not a capitalist), and I went from diffusion to resolution on the crisis of intimacy vs isolation. Academically, I have felt lucky to explore classes in many different departments, and discovered that I generally like to read and solve problems. Professionally, this has given me the ambition to become a communicator of science in some way, see if I like teaching physics to high schoolers and possibly move into writing textbooks for them if I can. The crisis of intimacy vs isolation was one with which I was highly preoccupied during late high school, but my time at Carleton has helped me with it. I graduated high school having never been in a relationship or been intimate with another person and I felt isolated, but coming to Carleton I’ve been able to see that honesty and showing care for other people can lead to a type of intimacy that all involved parties get the most out of, and this has helped me recognize intimacy where it is in my life, and made me feel less isolated.
The academic support center is well-setup for students to both form relationships and make progress on school work in a relaxing setting. The shape of the room is highly irregular, with separate rooms jutting out of the walls leaving space for nooks, and cubicle walls and tables of all sizes strategically placed; the academic skill center’s floorplan would resemble a big lake, with students concentrated on the islands and bays. There are some spaces that are conducive to solitary, quiet work, while others that can let students work in groups at larger tables, and some areas with only nice chairs and without tables, where the students can talk and relax. This week, I got to help a student taking a quiz in one of the rooms off to the side. This one was smaller, with tables facing the same way and a teacher always supervising, so it was most conducive to focused work. I was asked to help a student who had been disengaged and was using his phone when he was asked to take a math quiz. The teacher asked me to sit at the table with him in the hopes that having an adult watching only him would make him take the quiz seriously, and I could see that he was off-focus but individual attention was helping. I took a picture of his workspace, which is shown here, there is a hanging picture of a mountain that helps makes the space more relaxed.

 

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