By Bryant Romero—
The office of Campus Life,
which is located on the first floor at the Gilligan Student Union Building, is a department that has been designed to provide assistance to students, faculty, staff, and visitors of New Jersey City University.
The staff at campus life encourages students to make healthy lifestyle choices that can create challenges and provide support. They are advocates for students who want to maximize their academic, professional, and co-curricular experiences.
The main goal for Campus Life is to get the NJCU community involved in programs, services, and to promote involvement throughout the University.
One of the Assistant Directors for this department is Jeffrey Dessources who is also the Coordinator of the Center for Student Success. He started his position as Assistant Director for Campus Life in August 2012.
“I am originally from New York City. I have been working in Student Affairs for 8 years. As I was looking to continue to grow as a Student Affairs professional I came across the opening for the position I am currently in,” said Dessources.
Dessources is basically responsible for working with the other Assistant Directors and staff members to help create valuable co-curricular experiences and services for everyone in the campus community.
“I particularly work towards developing [academic] events and culturally driven events,” said Dessources.
Aside from Dessources’ responsibilities in Campus Life, he also finds time for his other position as Coordinator of the Center for Student Success to oversee a group of talented students who are trained to tutor basic math and English. They also assist in developing great student success driven workshops.
Despite having two positions, and important tasks to be done as one of the Assistant Directors, Dessources takes pleasure in working with many talented individuals at Campus Life. He finds it exciting and worthwhile; he would love to see students to continue to attend more events, and to grow as leaders. The only challenging aspect of the job he says “is to assure that I’m doing my best in helping to achieve those goals.”
The people that run Campus Life make this program possible by creating a team structure and recognizing the importance to continue improvements in areas of orientation, activities, leadership, student government, community service, scheduling, and event services. Within this team structure, the staff provides knowledge, accuracy, flexibility, and effective time management and resources, while also understanding individual needs.
“I absolutely love my job. The staff I work with are amazingly talented and serve as [a] great support system. I’m allowed to be creative and develop new ideas that have the interests of the students in mind. I get an opportunity to provide a co curricular experience that means something and is also fun. Whether it is a workshop on writing a great research paper or critically breaking down a new hip hop album, being able to create substantive programming is what I love most,” said Dessources.
