It’s early August and the halls are at rest. Down by the campus car park Canada Hall sits serenely on the greens. A short walk north is Trinity Hall, whose only raucous noise comes from a blackbird steupsing down at the occasional passerby. Off campus, up St. John’s Rd, the massive Arthur Lewis Hall is quiet but for the sound of the radio in the lobby, Olympics coverage.
These three, along with Milner Hall and Joyce Gibson-Innis Hall at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, comprise UWI St. Augustine’s halls of residence. Apart from the few remaining students (mostly international) they are empty. By the following week that will change. By mid-August the students will begin to stream in – from the region, the wider world, Tobago and even areas such as South Trinidad. As many as 1200 new and returning residents will populate these halls, a community within the campus community, one of UWI St. Augustine’s most vibrant communities of all.
“If you want a family atmosphere, if you want to be part of a community that supports and looks out for your development and ensures you that you get to the end of the journey, then the halls are the best place for you,” says Kevin Snaggs, Manager of Student Accommodation On and Off Camps at UWI St. Augustine.
Speaking to me from his office at Arthur Lewis Hall, Snaggs is well-placed to explain hall life. Since 2010 he has been the residence manager at Arthur Lewis, the newest and largest hall of residence with a capacity for over 450 students. The second largest, Milner Hall (which can accommodate 330 students) is also the oldest, founded in 1927 when the campus was still the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture.
Last year he was promoted to his current post as part of an overall restructuring of St. Augustine’s Student Advisory Services, which has now become the Division of Student Services and Development. His jurisdiction has grown from one hall to every hall, along with oversight on off-campus private housing in the nearby neighborhoods.
His sentiments on a hall life are the same as those of Allyson Logie-Eustace, hall supervisor of Trinity Hall: “The whole purpose of being on hall is to give students the opportunity to bond, to become part of a community and to learn diversity. It’s about community living”.
Logie-Eustace has developed a powerful reputation for her work as a hall supervisor. For her efforts she was presented with UWI St. Augustine’s Overall Employee Excellence Award at the Employee and Service Excellence Award 2014 ceremony. She sees enhancing the cohesion of the young women at Trinity Hall (St. Augustine’s lone all female hall of residence) as one of the most important aspects of her occupation.
Founded in 1972, Trinity Hall has capacity for more than 140 students, similar to its “brother” residence, Canada Hall. The all male hall, opened in 1963, has rooms for 168 students.
Speaking on life as a resident on Trinity Hall, Makini Barrow says, “We form a sisterhood”.
Makini, who is now going into her final year, has fully embraced hall life. Not only was she formed lasting friendships, she has taken up positions in student government, first becoming a block representative and earlier this year winning the election to become the chairperson of the residence’s hall committee.
Promoting this sense of community on hall is for the comfort of students. These are people, most of them having never lived outside of their parents homes, entering a new living arrangement and quite often a new country.
“We have a big percentage of residents from the region,” says Snaggs. “Quite a lot come from Barbados and St. Vincent as well as a growing population from Belize and the Bahamas. In the region as well we have a small portion from Haiti and we are starting to see more coming from Guyana. Internationally we have students coming from the US, Canada and Europe. And thanks to CARPIMS (the Caribbean-Pacific Island Mobility Scheme, a student exchange agreement) we have residents from Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Papau New Guinea and Vanuatu”.
Increasingly, students from Trinidad are staying on hall. Snaggs says that as much as 40 percent of Arthur Lewis residents are local (not including Tobago).
In these unfamiliar surroundings with so many unfamiliar people integration is important for the mental health of the students. It also helps with the inevitable disputes that arise.
“If there are two individuals sharing a room for the first time you might have a clash bases in cultural differences,” Makini says. “Some people come from homes where their parents took care of everything for them so they are not accustomed to cleaning up after themselves. They might have a roommate who is super clean and neat. I might study at night and my roommate might prefer to study during the day. These differences can cause conflict”.
Community norms can prevent or limit such conflicts through an atmosphere compromise and a resident driven system for conflict resolution.
Logie-Eustace says, “Being on hall, being on campus, you are going to have struggles – academic struggles and social struggles. Hall life is about facing challenges and finding support. The students want to do well. They want to make friends. They want to fit in. We help them do that”.
The other crucial aspect of living on hall is that it contributes to the development of the student. Learning is about more than successfully completing a course of study. There are life skills that can be enormously beneficial (and necessary) for young adults in both their professional and personal lives.
“Our goal,” Snaggs says, “is helping to develop students who are well-adjusted, who are engaged and who contribute to the region. We are looking for people who are culturally aware, who understand and appreciate diversity and who partake in the activities of the university and the society. So once they graduate they become better citizens”.
It was the eve of hall committee elections and Makini Barrow had prepared her speech. She had written it, practised it and was ready to speak before the sisterhood of Trinity Hall, to tell them why she was the candidate they should choose for the position of hall chairperson, the highest post in hall of residence student government. But standing before the young women of Trinity Hall, she decided instead to speak without the prepared statements.
 “I threw it away and just spoke,” Makini said. “I told them what my experiences were from the time I came on hall and how it contributed to my development. I told them the reason I wanted to be hall chair was to give back – not just what I have to give as an individual but also what the hall gave to me in terms of growth”.
Her message resonated with Trinity Hall. She took more than 70 percent of the 115 votes. After all, her story is very much a common story for residents at Trinity and the other halls of residence of UWI St. Augustine. She entered a new environment, faced certain challenges, found acceptance, built lasting friendships and felt a sense of personal development through the experience.
UWI Manager of Accommodations On and Off Campus, Kevin Snaggs, describes experience: “You are away from home for the first time and you are in a strange place. People are coming from far away. Even coming from Tobago or South may seem far to you because you have never been here before, far less coming from somewhere such as the South Pacific”.
For Makini, who came from St. Vincent and the Grenadines to study public sector management, not only did coming to live on hall in Trinidad mean leaving home, it meant leaving her young daughter.
“I’m a mother, I have a daughter and leaving her was the hardest thing,” she says.
It was in becoming part of the Trinity Hall community that she dealt with these pressures. She dealt with them so well in fact that she is now hall chairperson.
UWI campuses have a surprisingly well-articulated student government system that extends to the halls of residence as well. Each hall as several block representatives that oversee and handle disputes in the different blocks within the hall (Trinity Hall, for example, has six blocks).
Above the block representatives is the hall committee, which consists of committee members that handle different portfolios related to the hall. Hall committees may include a library representative, a computer representative, a food and beverage representative (who caters for all events), an entertainment representative (who has links to the various night clubs) and even “tuck shop” representative for the in-hall snack vendor.
The committee has an executive which includes chair, deputy chair and public relations officer. Members of the hall committees are also members of the Guild of Students.
The most recent addition to the hall structure is the resident assistant (RA). These are older, graduate level hall residents appointed by the university to provide support for students. RAs support the hall community by providing assistance, bringing residents together and resolving disputes.
“In the first week they will have a meeting – either a pizza lime or a Sunday cook,” Snaggs explains the process at Arthur Lewis Hall. They get people together. Then they may have a more formal block meeting where they talk about the rules of the hall. They will also go door to door, introducing themselves and checking in on people”.
That knock on the door can be crucial for reaching the less outgoing residents. On Trinity Hall that kind of community ethic is often carried out by the block representatives themselves.
“On my first week, that was the thing that pulled me in,” says Makini. “Somebody came and knocked on the door and said come outside, we are going to have fun. There was a girl there, I thought she was so rude and uptight when I first met her and on that day they said some joke and I was laughing at her. She said ‘why are you laughing at me?’ And I said well if you did something stupid I must laugh. From that we become friends. She is one of my best friends today. Everybody on our block became friends from that one little cook out”.
Now I go around and knock on the door and get the girls to come out of their room. Even if you are an introvert you will come out. We cook, we eat pizza, we play music, we play games, we talk about home. We just have fun”.
But hall life is about more than fun. Students are there to experience life but they are also there to complete courses of study and do well in those courses. Just as they play together, hall communities work together. During “matta season” (the last three weeks before exams) the lively halls go silent as exam preparations become the priority. Even lax residents are motivated to study because of the positive reinforcement of their hall mates.
Hall life is an asset for academics. Their libraries contain the notes and past papers of previous residents. Their communities contain the collective knowledge of hundreds of bright young minds who direct contact or social media can share knowledge, information and advice.
“We have a lot of high achievers on hall,” Makini says, “and not just in academics. We have great athletes. We have dietitians. I am anemic and through my friendships on hall I get proper advice on healthy eating”.
Entering her final year at university and her first year as hall chair, Makini has grown from the person she was before leaving home. More than anything else, she has become more open to people and possibilities: “To be honest, when I was in St. Vincent I thought my life was getting a job, getting a loan to study, going to study, come back and work. But now I realise there are so many opportunities beyond what my mind had told me. That’s why I stayed here this vacation. I could have gone home and been with my daughter but I decided to make the sacrifice and go to Guild meetings”.
She says, “It built me as an individual to realise it is not me alone in the world. A lot of people form friendships on campus but being on hall you form friendships like sisters. You get sick, these are the people who tend to you. You have a bad exam, these are the people you cry to. Most people think they are alone and they have nobody to turn to. Hall taught me otherwise”.
“I came to Trinity Hall in 2000. I discovered my passion for it in 2006,” says Allyson Logie-Eustace, hall supervisor.
Like many outside, and some inside, she did not at first grasp the significance of life on hall.
“I was doing my job, lots of paperwork, keeping my head down,” she describes.
That changed one day while walking through the hall and encountering a final year student:
“I said to her, ‘how are you? Sorry to see you go. I hope you had a nice year’. And she turned around and said to me ‘it was the worst year of my life’. My jaw dropped. Her story changed my life and sparked my passion to learn more about student personnel administration”.
The thing about communities, although they can be enormously enriching, sometimes they have a dark side. Sometimes communities can be exclusionary. Sometimes they can feel exclusionary even if they are not, if the person on the outside doesn’t have the emotional tools necessary to integrate.
The university is more mindful of this than ever before.
 “We see ourselves providing for a full range of the developmental needs of students, the developmental needs that come out of living on your own and learning how to cope on your own,” says Student Accommodation Manager Kevin Snaggs.
Like Logie-Eustace, when he took the post of residence manager at Arthur Lewis Hall (he opened the hall in 2010), Snaggs underestimated the task.
“My background is in hotel management so when I came here it was with very much that mindset. I found afterwards it was very different,” he says. “In a hotel our goal was to keep the place clean, keep it well-maintained and keep the guests happy, very simple. Managing a hall is much more than that. We have a responsibility for the development of the students, their out of classroom learning”.
This ethos has very much shaped the modern management of the St. Augustine Campus’s halls of residence of which Allyson Logie-Eustace is a pioneer.
She says of Trinity Hall, “What we try to encourage here is more than just tolerance. We have to appreciate diversity. We have to appreciate each and every person for what they have to offer. People say the campus is friendly and welcoming. What makes it welcoming? We are the ones that must make it so”.
As supervisor on Trinity Hall she has created a host of events and activities for the benefit of the residents. Many of the campus’s experts in areas such as medical health, mental health, security and self-defense and many others make visits to the hall to interact with and educate the young women (how to cope with the transition into adult life. She also surveyed the residences themselves to better understand their needs, and how to create positive activities that may enhance their campus and hall life experience.
“You don’t know what challenges a student has before they come to campus,” she says. “Perhaps they have experienced sexual abuse, abuse in the home. We have to mindful”.
The hall supervisor operates with the motto “do no harm”. Arthur Lewis Hall has some of the same types of initiatives from the very simple such as giving residents knowledge from cooking and washing their clothes, to support for accessing campus resources like counseling and financial aid, to developmental programmes.
Mr. Snaggs says, “We also try to identify students who may be at risk. I’m talking about risk of depression because they are away from home. They may be struggling because they don’t have enough money. They may be struggling academically. We learn how to identify the signs. They start to isolate themselves or getting sick often or lashing out at people”.
Hall staff and the resident assistants, graduate-level hall residences appointed by the university may approach students they believe to be at risk and offer support.
“Because we have such a close relationship with our residents, we have an opportunity to identify these things before they become a bigger problem,” he says.
One of the problems hall residents have traditionally faced that the university has made major strides in dealing with is hazing. Hazing, called “grubbing” or “ragging” on the campus, is the act of putting individuals through ritualistic ordeals as a price for membership in the group. It happens in certain exclusive occupations such as the protective services, secret societies and university fraternities. Hazing can include sleep deprivation, verbal and physical abuse and forced exercise. For many years hazing was a part of hall culture.
“They (the student power structure on hall) believed that in order to belong you had to be initiated,” says Logie-Eustace. “They tried to twist it by saying it is like what happens at fraternities and sororities but it is not. It is bullying”.
Among her files the hall supervisor has written statements by past residents describing not only the abuse but its emotional effects – anxiety, isolation and even poor academic performance. The young woman she first encountered in 2006 that called her year on hall the worst of her life, was a victim of hazing.
“That girl changed my life,” Logie-Eustace said. “I told myself never again”.
Through her pioneering work and the efforts of others in the university community hazing has been (significantly reduced), unfortunately, in other Halls is may have been forced underground, due to the zero tolerance policy by Administration.
“Over the years hazing has become something the university has identified as a problem and we have done a lot to improve the situation,” says Snaggs. “When we opened Arthur Lewis we had a complete overhaul of how we operated these things”.
One of the key changes was the introduction of resident assistants (RAs). It is important to remember that hazing is directed by the social leaders within the hall, sometimes including the hall committees. The RAs live on hall and are separate from the student power structure, as they are part of administration, assisting students on hall who have been marginialised by the hall community.
“Hazing is used as a way to get people to become part of the hall culture,” Snaggs says. “So we have changed the hall culture tofind better ways to make people part of the community”.
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