SSU professor's slice of dorm life
Published: Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 6:38 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 6:38 p.m.
For three years, in a ground floor, corner apartment at a Sonoma State University freshman dorm, Kelly Estrada, has been an unusual presence.
She's been the only SSU faculty member living among students.
An education professor at SSU since 2005, she, her husband and her mother have lived in Sauvignon Village since 2008 as part of the Freshman Year Experience, a program meant to help freshmen in their transition to college.
For Estrada, 49, the experience has been part job, part intentional educational experiment now coming to an end and part financial advantage (her 4-room apartment is rent free).
It stressed her marriage at times, revived a tendency, suppressed by adulthood, to drop the F-bomb, and drew on her “mothering nurturing” side.
“It's like child rearing,” she said. “It's intensive.”
Estrada's experience is new to her in other ways because even as a college student, she was a commuter, attending community college is San Diego and then UC San Diego, where she received her Ph.D.
Moving into SSU's freshman housing complex “was like we were going to college for the first time,” she said.
She is one of several SSU faculty — but the only one who lives in student housing — who teach classes and organize activities designed to help 180 first-year students who chose to be in the program adjust to a life of greater opportunities and responsibilities.
On that front, there are two ways of putting it.
“They think it's Animal House and they're coming here to party party party,” she said. “We try to balance that.”
In educational terms, the program “creates community context that's academic oriented,” Estrada said, “and helps them form a more complex, successful perspective of the college experience.”
Estrada, who teaches graduate students pursuing middle school and high school teaching credentials, has deepened her understanding of older teenagers, which has helped her professionally.
There are several ways of putting that, too.
“I have a much more complex, richer sense of the developmental needs of adolescents with respect to their emotional and their intellectual development,” she said.
Or: “They like to do laundry at one in the morning, I don't know why,” she said.
Her freshmen student neighbors say that they appeciate the concept — and feel Estrada's pain.
“The idea behind it is really cool, but at times it clashes with the realities of American college life,” said Marc Hart, 19, who lives across a courtyard from the Estrada family.
He recalled the beginning of the semester
“It was a pretty tough semester,” Hart said. “I mean, literally, a grandma lives next to college freshmen. It's a pretty interesting set up.”
That grandmother, Nicol
“They're kids, that's what they're supposed to do,” Bianchi said. “My concern was that they're kids and here to have freedom from their parents and a college experience, I didn't want to cramp their style.
“Every now and then you see them crawling in windows, but that's not unusual,” she said. “My kids used to crawl in windows all the time.”
Estrada's husband, Tom Coyle, 38, who describes himself as an “extremely private person,” said it was a rougher three years for him — especially, perhaps, because they moved to the residential complex of 500 students from a 4,000-acre Hopland ranch.
“Having this many people living this close is not my style,” he said. “Most of the students are pretty nice, respectful. But there are a few who are in their own little world.”
That means students who do things like walk past their bedroom to the laundry room “at two and three in the morning, screaming and yelling,” he said.
At other times, the door handles on his truck were spit upon and food has been thrown on his windshield, he said.
Estrada doesn't have — or want — the authority to discipline students; professional program staff handle that responsiblity.
But on occasion she has called the staff to report carousing in the wee hours.
“But it's always anonymous,” she said. “It's not like, ‘It's Dr. E calling.'”
His wife is always, Coyle noted, at work.
“It definitely put a strain on the relationship,” he said. “For instance, Kelly never goes home. So when students come round at 10 or 11 at night, we have to drop everything.”
Both Estrada and her husband found the lack of privacy the hardest thing to adjust to, they said.
“They're watching me out of their windows, they see me come and go,” she said. “I wasn't prepared for the loss of anonymity.”
Still, she said, “They love me and I love them. They can knock on my door any time day or night, and they know that.”
The family is now preparing to move. The next resident faculty member, Chicano and Latino Studies professor Daniel Malpica, will stay only a year, Estrada said, “so that they maintain the same kind of energy level and focus and then loop out before they get burned out.”
Malpica, who is married and has two young daughters, has been briefed.
“She's been preparing me a lot and not only me but my partner and also my kids,” he said. “I think we'll be okay.”
Malpica has prior experience with the arrangement, but from its opposite side. As a Whittier College student, he lived in a student housing complex with faculty members in residence.
“I remember vividly interacting with whole families and I think it was very, very helpful for me,” he said.
Outside Estrada's apartment, freshman Aaron Robinson, 19, offered an encouraging endorsement of the experiment and Estrada's unusual three years.
“It is really different,” he said. “It shows that they care about the students and they're willing to live with them.”
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.