I knock on the sturdy door and hear a friendly voice shout, “Come in!” through the wood. I push the door open, exerting more effort than I would with a normal door because there’s sound proofing liner at the bottom and it catches on the carpet.
I walk in and scan the room. My eyes lock with the enormous and inquisitive blue eyes of 9-month-old Elias Corona as his grandmother feeds him smashed up (avocado maybe?) at the kitchen table. I smile, and he widens his mouth in an attempted grin.
I see two tiny white teeth barely poking through his gums and yep, definitely avocado, oozing out of his mostly toothless smirk. “My parents got here early, surprise!” says Kayla Corona, resident director of women’s quads for the past five years. She’s organizing various baby items against the wall.
Earlier that day, I had asked if she and Rusty Tuders, assistant resident director of Heritage for four years, could meet me at Corona’s apartment to discuss their experiences in Residence Life as they are both leaving after the end of this academic year.
“We can meet outside since it’s so nice.” Corona says as she gingerly picks up a brightly colored, teething toy from the floor and places it in a wicker basket.
The door opens, the hesitant swishing noise of thick carpet once again fighting against the rubber strip. Tuders walks straight to Eli. “Hi there!” he coos in the baby’s face.
After a couple more minutes of Corona’s cleaning and Tuder’s baby talk, we are walking outside to the back patio of the Bowld Commons. We sit at one of the few tables not covered in yellowish green pollen.
A little background about the two people sitting in front of me:
Kayla Corona graduated from Union in May of 2010, moved to Venezuela and taught English for two years. In August of 2012, she returned to Jackson as an Assistant Resident Director for two years, after which she became Resident Director and has functioned as such since 2014. She lives in the Bowld Commons with her husband, Daniel, and son Elias.
Rusty Tuders graduated from Union in May of 2013, immediately got a position as a Safety & Security officer, and after two years applied to be the Assistant Resident Director for Heritage and is finishing his fourth year in that role. He lives in the McAfee Commons with his wife, Susan, and daughter Lucy.
Corona and Tuders agreed to meet with me one Friday afternoon to take a walk down memory lane and remember some of their favorite and most transformative moments working in Residence Life.
These are their honest, entertaining and heart-warming responses.
Q: Did you have any major life changes while working in Residence Life?
Corona: “For me, all of my biggest life changes happened while being a RD. It’s interesting that I started as a single woman, and I was single for the first 4 years as a RD. I got to enjoy living life with students and having more time to devote to them, but then my fifth year got married, so that was a big adjustment.” [smiles] “Inviting [my husband] into the Residence Life life and getting to know other Resident Advisors, and [we] had a baby last year, my seventh year. I’ve been doing RD as a wife and a mom. It’s been different.”
Tuders: “I was engaged when I started security. It was weird because we lived off campus, we were married, I worked security. That was our first transition through marriage, and after a couple years in that, we came over here. It was like we moved from married couple off campus to on-campus and trying to figure out, ‘Alright what does privacy even look like anymore?’ When Lucy was born, that was another huge transition of trying to figure out, like, what does it look like to have a kid on campus? There were several times where she would be up at 7:00 in the morning regardless of what happened [the night before]. There were a couple times we had to do middle of the night student transports to Memphis dealing with mental health things, and I’d come home and be back to [being a father]. “
Corona: “I think it’s been really cool to see how RA’s have been able to come to me just through different seasons of life and getting to walk through singleness with a lot of my RA’s who struggled with that my first couple years, and then getting to walk through what does engagement look like and wedding planning stress, how to prepare for marriage and not worry about a wedding date. Those are conversations I still get to have and even now in motherhood. It’s been cool to be able to let students see all the good, the bad and the ugly of all these transitions of life. It’s a unique position to where we get to live our lives out in the open, and I’ve really enjoyed it.”
Sidenote:
Tuders: “We not only get to live our lives in front of students, but we get to live our lives with each other. We were eating dinner last night and Eli was, like, gagging on potatoes or whatever it was…”
Corona: “Yeah, like freaking out.”
Tuders: “…and she was like, ‘Is he choking?’ I’m like, ‘No, this is what that is,’ and I’m telling her, ’cause I’ve been there, ya know? ‘He’s fine, just let him figure it out.’ We get to live with each other and help each other out.”
Q: What is the balance between privacy and transparency with students?
Corona: “It’s a hard balance. All of our spouses are different. The Bredows are such extroverts, they’re like, ‘People come over all the time!’ and love it. While for [Daniel and I], being newlyweds, we did want some space, and Daniel works long days, so I’ve told my girls, my staff, ‘If the door’s unlocked and you knock, come in. If it’s locked, we’re having family time. I’ve had to learn the balance of not spending every moment with students.”
Tuders: “One of the weird transitions we had was the semester that Lucy was born. She was born in July, we got Buster in April. We always say that our door should’ve been a revolving door because there were constantly students coming in to our apartment and they’d never say a word to us. They would sit in the floor and they would pet Buster, and I’d try to make small talk. Susan and I were like, ‘I wonder how long we could go without anybody talking to us?’ We’d just sit on the couch and watch people pet Buster in our living room floor. It was just an awkward amount of time and we were like, ‘Is this not awkward for anyone else?’ After a week or so, we had to set the expectation that, no, this can’t be the way this works.”
Q: Favorite Residence Life memory?
Tuders: “One of my favorite one on one’s I’ve had with an RA was Jenni Tingley. She had kopi luwak. You’ve probably heard of it, it’s this coffee bean that this cat animal thing in Indonesia, it eats these coffee beans, from the coffee plant, and like poops the beans out, then they roast those beans. And it’s like something to do with the process of [the cat] digesting it. I don’t know, but anyways it’s a delicacy over there and Jenni had this bag of coffee beans that she’d never tried before and when I first got here she was telling me about it and she asked if I would drink some with her. I ground the beans and made it on my French press and we just sat and talked and drank this coffee from the poop cat.” [laughs]
Corona and I ask, “What did it taste like? Was it good?” almost simultaneously.
Tuders: “It was good. This is weird, but it is the smoothest coffee I’ve ever drank. You know when you add milk to coffee and it makes it smoother? This was like coffee without milk, and it was so smooth.”
Corona: “A fun memory, this was my second year, sadly Rusty wasn’t a part of ResLife yet, but at the end of the year in May, we were just done cause housing is hard, people complain, we were tired and Skyzone had just opened up so all the RD’s, we dressed up in weird outfits and went to Skyzone in the middle of the day, a bunch of adults in their late 20s, and just jumped at Skyzone for an hour and got our stress out. I think that was the moment when I was like, this is my family, these are my people, we do silly things together, we walk through really hard things. That had been a really hard year on campus. I think we were in the newspaper, the Jackson Sun, which was really awkward, but it was just fun. Even that is vulnerable, at what other job do you go with your coworkers to Skyzone?”
Q: What has discipleship and community looked like in your positions?
Corona: “Discipleship my first year, a lot of my connections with RA’s were through fun things to make them feel comfortable with me. I dressed up with one girl in 80’s clothes and we went to Skating is Gr8.” [Tuders and Corona both laugh.]
(The same roller-skating place has changed names so many times it’s difficult to keep track which name it goes by currently.)
“…or Magic Wheels and would have talks about life while skating. Ashley Akerson, while she was an RA, we went to the shooting range and shot guns, but we talked about life and now I think seasons have changed and I don’t get to do as many fun things with students, but the conversations haven’t changed so I think for me, discipleship has very much looked like being willing to ask the hard questions. My desire in discipleship here is to model vulnerability and open up conversation beyond surface-level things.”
Q: Advice to students who are intimidated by the RD?
Corona: “If I were to give advice for how a student should interact with the RD next year, the reason we’re here is not because I love to catch you breaking rules, I love when you have candles in your room and I love having to submit fines, that’s not why anyone would sign up for this job. Students who are really outside of ResLife don’t really get to see that and realize that about our lives, that for us it’s not the easiest life to live: in a fish bowl on a college campus with your family, but we choose to do it because we love students.
And we love to see them develop and change and grow, so my advice would be reach out to your RD. Don’t be intimidated! If you have a problem, know that we’re professionals who have done this for a long time, or have been trained really well to give you advice and to help you walk through really hard things. Then if you’ve made a mistake, there’s grace. We’re a very redemptive community, and we desire for students to make good choices. We’d rather you fail here so we can help pick you back up, because if you fail in the real world, there’s not people there to support you. That’s what our role is in discipline, is to help pick you back up, not kick you while you’re down.”
Tuders: “We have a ministry of interruption and I love getting that knock on the door whether it’s an RA or any student. I remember sitting on the bench right outside our house with a student having suicidal ideation and walking through that with them. Those things are what we’re here for and what the Lord has called me to do. Nobody likes to be the person to enforce rules. I don’t even think police officers get into it to pull people over for traffic violations. That’s not why we get into it.”
Q: What will you miss the most after leaving Union?
Corona: “Just thinking about RA’s becoming family, these really sweet memories of these girls becoming like my little sisters and my friends and gosh… it’s just such a hard transition. Even for Daniel, he’s an introvert but he loves people and he thinks of our team as his daughters, he gets really protective over them, he wants to give advice, check on their boyfriends. This is the only job I can think of that is so integrated of family, cause even being a pastor, yes it’s very much ministry, but we’re living with you guys. It’s different. I remember when Eli was six weeks old, screaming, and I was like ‘I’m losing my mind, I can’t do this as a mom’ and I texted my RA’s and was like, ‘I just need to dry my hair.’” Corona’s voice breaks and her eyes fill with tears.
“Morgan Ray came over and held him and rocked him while I’m like struggling. Time and time again how students have served us in so many ways, it’s going to be hard leaving, but it’s been a good run.”
Tuders: “Lucy has 400 friends in her backyard, and she calls them her friends. We’ll be walking around campus and she’ll say, ‘Daddy, wave at him!’ and at Disney, she didn’t know a stranger. She’s used to [a place] where everyone knows her and she talks to everybody so I’m going to miss walking around campus with her and her waving at everybody. She’s still going to do that, but people aren’t going to know her out there. Here, people know that, ‘Oh, that’s Lucy!’ The other day I opened the door and she walked out into the commons, and there were five girls sitting on the couches over there and Lucy grabbed her blanket and just went out there and sat with them and I had no idea who they were. I’m going to miss her interacting with college students. I’m going to miss the RD’s, investing in students as my job and just doing life with people.”
Q: Where are you going after this?
Tuders: “I’m applying for jobs in Chattanooga. Susan is already out there working in Labor and Delivery at Erlanger.”
Corona: “I’m moving so far away.” [smiles sarcastically] “Six minutes down the road! We bought a house in Jackson and [I’m] just going to transition into more time with Elias at home, sweet nugget. I’m teaching Spanish to homeschoolers right now on the side, and hoping to invest more in church and relationships.”
Q: Who is Buster going to live with?
Tuders: “Buster is going to live with Ashley. My family refuses to talk about it right now, though. Buster was in training when Lucy was born and then after a couple weeks we brought Buster back, so Buster and Lucy have grown up in our family together. Her first words were ‘Bubba’ and she was referring to Buster. She was sitting in her high chair and she said ‘Bubba,’ and he had just walked in the room and I was like, ‘She just said Bubba’ and Susan was like, ‘No,’ and I was like, ‘Lucy where’s Bubba?’ and she just points to him and I was like her first words were Buster… so he’s going to live with Ashley. He loves Ashley.”
–
I look at them both and smile to myself as we sit in the shade on this rare, perfectly temperate Tennessee day. These people have been two of my mentors for the past three years. They’ve forced me, my coworkers and countless students out of childhood comfort zones to address insecurities, doubts, fears and so much more.
They don’t know how richly they’ve blessed the Union community for endlessly sharing their lives with students, opening themselves up to criticism and judgment but always modeling what it looks like to return to the Lord as He reminds them why they were called to Residence Life in the first place.
Within a single hour, the three of us have both laughed and grown misty-eyed over the memories of their time at Union that is coming to a close.
“I’ve been here for ten years. Four as a student, two as security and four as an ARD. It’s almost like I have to figure out how to do life off of a college campus,” Tuders says, smiling. “Don’t miss your opportunity here. Invest in the people around you for the time that you have here. You’re not just passing through.”