{"id":201772,"date":"2017-03-20T12:34:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T16:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=201772"},"modified":"2023-07-25T12:45:05","modified_gmt":"2023-07-25T16:45:05","slug":"where-are-they-now-catching-up-with-alum-louis-cameron-16-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2017\/03\/where-are-they-now-catching-up-with-alum-louis-cameron-16-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Are They Now? Catching Up With Alum Louis Cameron \u201916 MA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story, written by educational leadership\u00a0program coordinator\u00a0Carissa Rutkaukas, originally appeared on the Neag School\u2019s\u00a0Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) program website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Louis
Louis Cameron III \u201916 MA, alum of the Neag School\u2019s Higher Education and Student Affairs program, now serves as a resident director at Boston College. (Photo courtesy of Louis Cameron)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Louis Cameron III \u201916 MA, an alum of the Neag School\u2019s\u00a0Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) program<\/a>, is no stranger to exploring new communities. Born in W\u00fcrzburg, Germany, and having lived in or visited Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Boston, New York City, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, Cameron\u00a0is a self-declared extrovert who identifies himself as a\u00a0Black man who has worked at and attended predominantly White institutions. He says he believes that equity-minded policies, practices, and programs for people with marginalized identities are essential, both inside and out of institutions of higher education.<\/p>\n

After graduating from East Carolina University, in Greenville, N.C. in 2013, the HESA program in the Department of\u00a0Educational Leadership at UConn\u2019s Neag School was Cameron\u2019s next stop. He describes his\u00a0two years in the HESA program as the most formative years of his life. \u201cI love everything about UConn,\u201d he says. Cameron says he\u00a0misses graduate school and the learning perspective it affords, where he says his cohort offered him opportunities to reflect on his assistantship, practicum, and readings with like-minded individuals.<\/p>\n

Today, Louis Cameron III \u201916 MA serves as a\u00a0resident director for 310 first-year\u00a0residents on\u00a0the Newton campus of Boston College and supervises a team of 15 individuals, including 12 resident assistants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now the resident director (RD) for 310 first-year\u00a0residents of Hardey and Cushing Houses on the Newton campus of Boston College, Cameron\u00a0supervises a team of 12 resident assistants (RAs), one graduate staff assistant, one programming graduate assistant, and one graduate minister. In this position, his priority is to assist residents transitioning into the college environment, which is a great fit, as Cameron\u00a0is energized by working with first-year students. Recently, he completed training his RAs, with a focus on rejuvenating his staff, and is looking forward to the RA selection process. At Boston College, the RDs change residences each year, so Cameron says he\u00a0is excited about interviewing and selecting strong staff who will remain at Hardey and Cushing Houses in the coming year, carrying on his vision even after he moves on.<\/p>\n

While he enjoys the challenges of working in an environment different from his UConn experience, Cameron says he\u00a0knows he will not remain in residential life forever, even though he was an RA as an undergraduate student. When Cameron\u00a0accepted his position, he says he had in mind a piece of advice given to him as a first-year HESA student by a then second-year HESA student: Your first position out of graduate school does not have to be your dream job or your forever job; think about the benefits and opportunities for growth it can provide you.<\/p>\n

\"Louis
Cameron, second from left, celebrates with family from Massachusetts and Virginia during his 2016 UConn HESA Hooding Ceremony in Storrs. (Photo courtesy of Louis Cameron)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As an RD at Boston College, Cameron\u00a0says he sees an opportunity to work somewhere that provides housing, and where he can gain experience supervising a staff, training undergraduate students, overseeing a community, and facilitating conduct hearings. It is a generalist position at\u00a0an institution that is different from his HESA experience at a large, public, flagship research institution. Boston College is a private, smaller, conservative Jesuit institution, with a much different student population, especially in terms of race and class.<\/p>\n

Cameron\u2019s\u00a0time at Boston College is providing him\u00a0with unique experiences, he says, which include serving in an on-call duty rotation, furthering his passion area through the department\u2019s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee, and working with a diverse group of students, as well as colleagues that have a variety of professional competencies.<\/p>\n

Looking forward, this RD sees his future intersecting\u00a0four\u00a0competencies: student conduct; ethics and morality; equity, social justice, and inclusion; and assessment, evaluation and research. Such\u00a0competencies were, he says,\u00a0strongly emphasized\u00a0by his HESA faculty at UConn, including Cathy Cocks, director of community standards at UConn, and\u00a0Milagros Castillo-Montoya<\/a>, assistant professor and\u00a0interim director<\/a>\u00a0of HESA.<\/p>\n

\u201cCathy is a friend and mentor and inspires me in my understanding of student conduct and ethical fitness,\u201d Cameron\u00a0says. \u201cAnd thanks to Milagros, I know more about equity-mindedness, and I am now obsessed with assessment \u2014 going into HESA, I did not like research or assessment, but now I\u2019m a huge Qualtrics fan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only time will tell which college or university Cameron\u00a0will call home in the future, but for now, he is settling into his role at Boston College as a professional, after 20 years of being a student. He says he is using this opportunity to work on his self-reflection as a practitioner, and to discover how to adapt his learning and developing for a nonacademic role. Cameron says he is also looking forward to auditing a course on higher education public policy to expand his knowledge. You might even see him on campus in May for the HESA graduation ceremonies.<\/p>\n

View\u00a0this story as it originally appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the Higher Education and Student Affairs website. Learn more about the Neag School\u2019s HESA program at\u00a0hesa.uconn.edu<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louis Cameron III \u201916 MA, an alum of the Neag School\u2019s Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) program, is no stranger to exploring new communities, having been born in W\u00fcrzburg, Germany, and having lived in or visited Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Boston, New York City, San Antonio, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2455],"class_list":["post-201772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 15:08:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201781,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201772\/revisions\/201781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201772"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=201772"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=201772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}