For the Office of Residential Life, there are a wide variety of topics and issues that come up during the course of the year. While our website is comprehensive and easy-to-use, and our RD and RA staff is proactive in providing essential information and addressing individual needs, many students and their parents still prefer to contact us directly to request assistance, to express a concern, to voice an anxiety, or to profess disatisfaction with some aspect of Residential Life at Ithaca College. Our Office Assistants are frequently the ones to illuminate, assuage, and mitigate during many of these contacts.

Office Assistants at Residential Life are essential members of our staff. We will rely on our OAs to respond knowledgably and appropriately to any question. Similarly, our OAs are able to rely on our professional and departmental staff to provide them with the information needed to respond, or direction as to who can.

This manual is meant to clarify what is expected of Office Assistants during their employment with Residential Life. However, it is not the entirety of what an OA will need to know. A significant amount of the knowledge OAs will need to command comes only through experience and asking questions. Knowing when to ask those questions, and knowing where to find the answers needed are essential to success as an Office Assistant.