My crazy idea and the NASPA Foundation

I came to the field of student affairs because of a passion for service-learning. While serving for a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer, working with community service programs at The Ohio State University, I gained some great hands-on experience in student affairs. I also gained a real appreciate for the lack of research on what really works in our field. My colleagues and mentors could share great, practical advice and knowledge from their own experience, I was looking for scientific evidence of the impact of our work on students.

Although I can look back now with a sense of amusement at my naiveté and positivistic assumptions about the value of different forms of knowledge, I continue to believe that we have a lot of work to do in student affairs to research how we can best support students’ learning and development. After my AmeriCorps experience and a few years into my doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, though, I stopped seeing a lack of research in my areas of interest as a problem and started seeing it as an opportunity!

Fast forward a few more years, and it came time for me to write a dissertation. I had a BIG IDEA that I can trace back all the way to that AmeriCorps experience – I wanted to do a large-scale, multi-institutional study of students who participated in alternative breaks (short-term, immersive service learning experiences) in order to identify empirically based best practices – basically, to figure out what works in alternative breaks. 

I quickly ran into a significant hurdle – money. Turns out that it is pretty expensive to collect multi-institutional data! That’s where the NASPA Foundation came in. Along with a few other funding sources (other professional associations and some small grants from my institution), I was able to come up with the money I needed to create the National Survey of Alternative Breaks (NSAB), a survey of over 2000 students who had participated in alternative breaks at almost 100 colleges and universities.

Because of the great support of the Foundation and other small grants, I was not only able to collect surveys from these students immediately after their alternative break, but was also able to collect follow-up survey data from over 500 of those students a year later, and then interview data from around 50 of those students a year after that.

Just over four years into this project (five if you count the year I spent applying for grants, defending my dissertation proposal, and getting ready to collect data), I can confidently say that the support of the NASPA Foundation has contributed greatly to our understanding of alternative break programs. For example, I have been able to explore how alternative breaks can influence students’ religiousness (look for an article in JCSD mid-2016 on this) and students’ career plans (see the most recent issue of JSARP for more on this one). I have also been able to provide insight into how alternative breaks can provide a context for positive diversity interactions, and how White students and students of color may experience alternative breaks differently….  And there is still more to come!

Importantly, the findings from the NSAB, although important for understanding alternative breaks specifically, can inform practice across many different areas of student affairs, including residence life, leadership programs, campus activities, and other community service and service-learning programs.

For me personally, though, the most important part of my NASPA Foundation grant was not necessarily in the money that went to support this crazy idea I had as a doc student, but rather in the confidence that it gave me that I could actually pull off this crazy idea. If the NASPA Foundation was willing to put money behind my project, maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all!

That, in my opinion, is one of the best things about the NASPA Foundation small grant program.  The money really does go to fund great ideas, whether those ideas are proposed by the established researchers in the field, or by new faculty, graduate students, or professionals. If you look at the names of the recent winners on the Foundation web site, you will see people who fall into all of those categories.

Although as a faculty member myself I obviously value the research contributions that faculty make to the field, I love the fact that the NASPA Foundation supports researcher from many different groups of people who have a lot to contribute to research in the field.  What better way to continue to move our field forward and improve our ability to support student learning and development?

The NASPA Foundation will award $30,000 for the 2015 Channing Briggs Small Grants. Applications are open through July 1, 2015. NASPA Foundation grants are funded by contributions from NASPA members and friends of the profession. You can help turn crazy ideas into innovative research by donating online today.