Living on campus is always fun. Even though you may have a lot of work to do for classes at school, there are also a lot of interesting activities created by your residents assistants on weekends. Of course, these activities are all free. All of the weekend’s activities are part of school’s programs and Saint Michael's College pays for students every time.
When I was in middle school in China, we also had some school activities, but most activities that school created were same and not not creative. For example, what we had were all about “class talents show” or “sport games” once a year, and the school did not provide budget to students’ leader to create more programs for students.
At Saint Michael’s College, whenever the weekend is closer, the RAs who will be on duty for weekend will have a meeting about what kind of programs they want create for school’s residents. I was one of the RAs in that meeting, and I think we had a really creative and fantastic idea for students this weekend. What we did is to cut male students’ hair, braid female students’ hair, diy hair and make different conditioners.
In our meeting, one of our RAs mentioned that he knows how to cut hair and he wants to teach other students because getting a haircut from barber shop can be expensive for some college students. It usually costs 25 dollars, and plus tips, it would be close to 30 dollars. However, buying an electric clipper from Amazon is only 20 dollars. Once students learn the skills, they do not have to spend couple hours to go to downtown to get a haircut instead of cut it by themselves.
As usual, we did our program in school’s student center on Saturday night. It was super successful because we cut and braid a lot of residents’ hair and more than 100 people came to our program. For this program, school paid all three new electric clippers, conditioner’s materials, hair chalk and foods. In addition, we did not hire any professional people from outside the school to cut and braid hair, but they were all RA volunteers.
When this program was almost finished, there were also some Chinese students came. They did not get a haircut because they thought it was a little funny to get a haircut from another student. But there was a Chinese girl to make conditioner for herself. I saw them and talked to them later, they said they had never seen students cutting hair at school and making conditioner by themselves. They stayed around and watched other students getting haircut for 30 minutes and then left. Obviously, they were absorbed by this program even though they did not get a haircut.
At Saint Michael’s College, we have programs on Friday and Saturday nights every week, and our goal is to get more and more residents engaged in school’s programs. Going to Saint Michael's College is about more than studying because we host many great activities every week. In addition, we would love to see more and more international students come and join us because this is also a good opportunity to hang out with American students and learn some local cultures. To be honest, I am one of RAs on our campus, and I have also learned a lot of new things about American cultures from our programs that I did not know before.
