Resident Experts

Resident Experts are Dartmouth undergraduates who offer tutoring and academic support for introductory courses within each of the House Communities, organized through the Academic Skills Center. They offer facilitated study halls, which for West House are (usually) located in the 3rd Floor Fahey Study Space. Students are encouraged bring all course materials, and you will also meet others within close proximity who are in your course that you can study with when the Resident Expert isn’t around.

Assistant Director: Dr. Ted Stratton

I am the Assistant Director of Residential Education for West House. I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in the nearby suburb of Montgomery County.  Upon graduation from high school I moved to Florida where I lived the majority of my adult life.  Both my PhD in Higher Education Administration and Student Affairs as well as my Bachelor’s in History and Political Science are from Florida State University.  I also hold a Masters in Educational Leadership from DePaul University in Chicago and am a current student in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program here at Dartmouth.

Before graduate school I was a middle and high school social studies teacher in Merritt Island, Florida.  I have worked in Housing and Student Affairs at both DePaul and Florida State and before arriving to Dartmouth I served as the Executive Director of the Florida Gubernatorial Fellows program within the Florida Governor’s office.  I live in an apartment in West House at the end of Fahey Hall with my wife and two children.

Exec Board Minute 4/23/17

 

  1. Relay for Life
    • We will be registering.
    • Get more information in terms of when we need to be registered by.
  2. Election Planning
    • Send out email this week for students to express interest. Week of May 1st, announce the candidates and then do the actual elections on May 4th
      • Send email to the people that checked on the merch survey that they would be interested in being involved.
  1. All gear orders are submitted and should get by the housing date.
    • Should get here by a week from Friday
    • Extra set of short sleeved t-shirts ordered.
  2. Future IM’s and Green Key Plans
    • “The Main Street Mile” an event happening during Green Key.
      • Keep track of what House people are in and then put that into the score and then there can be a prize for the House that has a combination of the best scores and participation.
      • This is being run by the Upper Valley running club.
    • There’s a 3 on 3 basketball tournament May 4th, registration is up to May 2nd, we could try and get a team together.
    • Event during Green Key.
      • Music outside would be a challenge, because you have to clear it with the town.
      • We could make Green Key tank tops?
      • Are we able to add events to the schedule through the student organization form?
      • We’ll see what they say.
  1. Future Social Events
    • Do this more in the future if they actually do end BarHop.
      • Mitigate spending by only giving people drink tickets and you only get two tickets, so two drinks.
  1. Co-sponsorship
    • If we start sponsoring events then it opens it to lots of other organizations also asking for funding. Don’t want to be put in the position to need to choose which Greek events are okay to sponsor and which aren’t. Might also make it unclear what our mission as a house is.
  2. Indoor Spaces
    • Kathy Henault was out of town this week, we need to set up a meeting for it. Maybe we should coordinate this sort of meeting with the other houses? So there can be less confusion.

Exec Board Minutes 4/16

 

  1. Planning for House Dinner:
    • Drinks reception as expected, will work with Pamela to schedule bar tenders
  2. BrewHaha Co-Sponsorship:
    • We have emailed to say we are not able to cosponsor
  3. Election Planning:
    • Hickox will work with House Council to see if we can run independently
    • We can use OrgSync Forms to do our own balloting
    • Should be quick and easy, no more than 2 weeks
  4. Update on Gear:
    • Should order this week
  5. Recruit Bartenders:
    • Pamela has 4 people already TIPS trained and 4 who want training
    • We may be able use bartenders to act as door monitors
  6. Logo/Crest
    • 85% support for Elm Crest
    • We will work with design firm to get some proofs of final designs
    • Crest is preferred
    • Working to standardized across houses

Exec Board Minutes 4/2

 

  1. Update on Elections
  • EPAC will not have any more info sessions, but we can appoint people.
  • People can email Noah if they want to get involved.
  • You have to officially say what position you want to apply for on Wednesday on the petition.
  • Will post on the Facebook page that people interested should email Noah, and if a lot people want to we can go back to EPAC.
  1. Update on Gear
  • Need to put together a catalog to get an order in hopefully by this week or next
  • Items: PJ pants, fleeces, hoodies, t-shirts (long sleeve w/ image on the pocket), baseball caps (someone wanted a blanket?)
    • Do we want something different on the back?
    • Outline of the dorms on the back?
    • Lone pine on the front and elm on the back?
  • Fleeces and hoodies would be from the place that we ordered before. What sort of hat would we want: normal baseball cap, with the tree on the front and then say West House on the back.
  • PJ pants can be found easily, maybe purple argyle or purple plaid and then get it embroidered.
  • West House image does not count as a Dartmouth image.
  • Each West House member can select one piece of gear
  • People only garunteed an item this time if they actually fill out the form.
  1. Bartenders
  • Once we get a list of people send the names to Joe Castelot and then he will schedule a class
  1. Spring Social Event?
  • Offsite is too risky, won’t work.
  • Idea: Barhop type of thing in the lounge here on a Friday night. The dean is fine with that.
  • Food and music out on the patio (Webster side patio) during or right before Green Key. Block party because there is always one there on Webster so we would get people right there in the area, people could easily walk through. Morano’s cart sponsored by West House!
    • Burgers and music?
    • Would we want to play music or if we want to bring in a group? Live music
  • Should we do a pub night? It’ll be hard to find a not when Collis won’t have something like that, maybe go for a Friday when they won’t be having one? Pub West.
    • Get someone to play acoustic guitar? Board games, etc.
    • Make sure we don’t compete with Collis After Dark
  1. Harvard and/or Yale Trip
  • Only do one, two will be pretty hard. Do one this term and then one in the Fall.
  • Harvard for this term?
  • Go down over a Saturday night, or Saturday afternoon, stay the night and then Sunday night go to one of their HOCO meetings and come up right after dinner.
  • Avoid Week 4 and 5 because those are midterms.
  • Maybe go for the end of Week 3? Or go for the 21 and 22?

 

 

Exec Board Minutes 3/5/2017

 

  1. Update on Elections
    • Noah met with head of EPAC: Elections planning and Advisory Commission.
    • Using OrgSync this year! So we will be able to sort by House. It will be easy to do House elections this way.
    • Get the specifics of what to do for each house, has been provided. Everything will be starting on Wednesday. Candidates will be told the campaign rules in an information session. There will be about four information sessions.
    • Should we hold open houses so that people get to talk to us and let them know what they would be doing?
    • Are we at the point where can loosely write job descriptions?
    • Do we want to have a reception or open house as an opportunity to talk about what the exec board etc.? Have it before the exec meeting?
  2. Spring Formal
    • Idea: Rather than an external formal, have a dance party within the house itself?
  1. Bartenders
    • Should we have our membership trained?
    • That way we can run our own events and do it all?
    • The Tips training is fairly short and online.
    • Should Tips training be something UGA’s can get CEC for?
  2. Field Trips to other House Systems
    • If it’s in the first few weeks in the term it could be a longer bit of time.
    • 3 hours to Yale, if you don’t hit traffic.
    • From talking to other systems is that we’re kind of on the right track?
    • Put a list together of issues that we’re worried about.
    • One overnight, one just Sunday?
  3. Apparel order
    • Converge on the stuff that we want to buy by the end of this week.
    • Have an order form done by the end of finals so that we can have a few weeks ahead.
    • West House blanket! Seems to be a good idea because it goes along with Dartmouth blankets.

 

Exec Board Minutes 2/19/2017

  1. Winter Carnival Tent Debrief
  • Tell people ahead of time to get there early! The got very long towards the end of the event.
  • We should do this in a different place!
  • A lot of people came down through the Choates, maybe just set up outside of Brown Hall? Or maybe the turn off to the Choates?
  • We had a good amount of people for the event, gave away around 70 mugs.
  1. Drinks Reception Debrief
  • It was wonderful, about 25-30 people came. Half faculty/staff and students.
  • It felt like people had a good time there and good connections seemed to be being made with people, good atmosphere but it would be nice for the numbers to expand.
  • Should we move the House dinners to Sunday nights, rather than Thursday?
  • We should have better advertisement and be sure that we enough people on door duty etc.
  • Should we hire student interns? To help with breakdown and posters?
    • House student assistant positions are already being listed on Jobnet, we should email Jeff Dewitt (hire two?) should the employees be West House members.
  1. House Directory Update
  • Meeting with Dean Burke this week?
  • Should we make a Facebook group as a backup if we can’t get the directory done?
  1. Operations Meeting Update
  • They have money for TV’s and we will be getting one for first floor Fahey.
  • We can also get movies and games to go with the TV, and we could set them up with the library to be checked out?
  • There will be a dining hall type screen in the Hypen for anouncements.
  •  We have the go ahead to set up libraries in the study rooms!
  •  We have the go ahead to get new furniture, we can find it or they have options that they can buy for us.
  •  Still pretty hesitant about making a Snack Bar out of the Hyphen, suggesting that we should just give food away for free.
  •  Issues with having a gym?
  • We need to have a quantitative view of how spaces are being used. We now have a week audit of what the usage of the spaces are, more info to come.
  1. Plans for Remainder of Winter
  • House Tea this Friday (about Med school.)
  • House dinner on the 7th of March, move it to the 5th
    • NOW MOVED TO 6PM ON SUNDAY WITH A RECEPTION BEFORE HAND, WE SHOULD PROBABLY GO AHEAD AND LIST THIS AS A TIER 2.
  1. Plans for Elections
  • Push for elections at the same time as Students Assembly in the Spring.
  • Elect: Chair, co-chair, general members
  • First year representation would be elected in the Fall during the ’21 only election.

House Fleeces

  • Should be coming this week! How should we distribute these throughout the house?
  • We ordered about 80, so there are enough for the UGA’s to each have one. Should we charge for them, and if so how do we go about doing that? (We wouldn’t charge more than 10.00 for them.)
  • In the long term, we won’t be able to give away house gear for free.
  • Is there more of a chance that people would actually wear it because they have to pay for them.
  • West House Exec. Board, pay for our fleeces.
  • West House student employees receiving them for free?
    • Make a Google Survey/Doc so that you can reserve your fleece but also have the option to note that you need financial aid. So have it set up so that they can submit privately to us that they need help.
    • Do we need 2x and 3x shirts?

 

Exec Board Minutes 2/5/2017

Minutes: February 5, 2017

 

  • Finalize Winter Carnival Plans
    • Prof. Hickox and Darby were told we cannot have a towel station on the ice
    • Noah recalled there being a tent on the road doing STD testing and asked to check if there was a way to have a tent on the road
      • This is apparently not possible
    • We are now planning towels and cocoa at Prof. Hickox’s house. There was a concern about attendance given that Hillel does cocoa and coffee and they are closer to the pond
    • It was impossible to rush order the big towels so we had to buy small towels
  • Update on House Directory
    • Noah met with Dean Biron and Mike Wooten and they prefer we have an opt in or opt out system instead of automatically placing student in the directory
    • Noah is meeting with Dean Burke soon to talk about the technical aspects of how to do this
  • Plans for Facilitation Discussions
    • Noah will reach out to Veselin to get an update on what was decided at Saturday’s meeting about aiding refugees
    • Hickox expressed his preference that we not add any new events to the calendar but instead incorporate guests into existing events like teas

Exec Board Minutes 1/22/17

  • Shifts for the Colleges Against Cancer Baazar:
    • 4:30-5:30: Noah, Ryan, and Tim
    • 5:30-6:30: Amaris and Alexis
  • Begun Discussion of House Facebook; Noah will meet with General Counsel and Dean Biron this week to discuss
  • The House should have more board games, maybe a platter of cookies available so students can just hang out in spaces. Baking club could also serve this purpose.
  • The Executive Board want to meet with Cathy Henault to discuss getting a new TV and video game system in Fahey 1
  • The House Executive Board would also like to look into having a gym and library in the house. Potential locations were discussed. The Executive Board like the study room on Fahey 4 for a library.