My Inaugural Post

I came up with a wild idea this morning. To develop a blog about my life in the field of Student Affairs. I'm not sure how many people actually have done this. I've seen some people blog to entire listervs. I've seen others just talk about their experiences in personal blogs (I'm guilty of that too) that include their love life, family and random other discussions.

This blog is unique. I even "googled" the idea to see what else is out there. There were quite a few college and university sponsored blogs geared to the field as well as "for profit" websites. This particular blog is coming from big ol' me.

I thought it would be a cool thing to write about my experiences in the world of Student Affairs. It's amazing how I've been intertwined into the threads that make up the blanket that keep each of us cozy, warm and fuzzy as we work with college-aged students - especially considering the cold start I had.

I chose the blog name "The Real World of Maslow" because his theory is one of the more heavily mentioned. To become a self-actualized individual is what he says we strive to be. I also chose it because I wanted something that would reference college students - so naturally MTV's "The Real World" came to mind. We work with these students just about everyday. We see the highs and lows and when life starts getting "real" with them and stop being polite. We strive to help the ones we REALLY connect with to be self-actualized individuals even while we're often not so sure if we've reached that pinnacle ourselves.

Each week I will strive to enter a grain of my experience into this blog. It's my hope that graduate students and new professionals read this and either learn from my mistakes or improve on my successes. It is also my hope that instructors in our field and other colleagues provide their own grains as we all come together.

The first few postings will be from previous posts I've made on one of the aforementioned types of blogs.

With that said and it being nearly 12:30 AM - I can retire to my bed knowing that I've gotten this nugget of an idea up and running.

Until then...

Dennis M. Hicks