By: Lance Lawton
He’s ready to make connections and help students succeed.
Mark Moultrup, the new resident hall director (RHD) for Griffon, Juda and Beshears Hall, knew he wanted to become a part of residential life ever since he was a college freshman at Central Michigan University, hoping to become a high school teacher. However, Moultrup said that it wasn’t until after a rough patch in his life that he became inspired.
“I didn’t believe my resident assistant was listening to my concerns that I had,” Moultrup said. “I also had a rough roommate situation; he would talk behind my back, which led to me not creating friendships throughout my hall.”
Moultrup wanted to drop out of college due to his struggles, until one night someone finally noticed and listened.
“It wasn’t until one night a different RA sat and talked with me about my problems into the early morning,” Moultrup said. “At that moment, I realized that I wanted to become involved with residential life.”
After four years as an RA, Moultrup wanted to stay in residential life “forever.” That’s when he found out about becoming a residential life professional, and he decided to attend grad school for a master’s in education leadership studies at Oklahoma State University. Although he thoroughly enjoyed his stay at Oklahoma State, he was thrilled to start his new job at Western, mainly because of the people.
“To me, the people make the place,” Moultrup said. “When I arrived here, the people were down-to-earth, they were willing to talk with me and the students were awesome. I knew this is where I wanted to be.”
For some people, the transition to a new institution can be easy, but it was a slight challenge for Moultrup to transition to Western from a large university.
“One big challenge I found was that there are less people at Western to do the same amount of work than there was at OK State,” Moultrup said. “However, OK State had budgets large enough to sustain certain offices that we didn’t need campus partners. At Western, although we don’t need to heavily rely on our partners, we still hold a strong connection with them, since we are a smaller university.”
After adjusting to several Western transitions, Moultrup feels right at home in the residence halls and is ready to create a successful future for his staff and other on-campus students.
“My biggest goal is to be a mentor not only to my staff, but the students who work and live in the residence halls,” Moultrup said. “Whether it’s talking about what students want to do after graduation, what they want to do while they’re here, what types of organizations they belong to, etc.; I just want to make a connection with everyone I meet. With the residential life access, it really feels like we’re making a difference in someone’s life.”