RA Interview: Maddie Nguyen

Interviewers: Mika Kohno

Interviewee: Maddie Nguyen

Maddie Nguyen is a COSMOS RA for Woodhall floor 3. In her interview, she shares her experience of being a UCI student.

Can you introduce yourself? 

My name is Maddie Nguyen. I am a third year student studying business economics and environmental science at UC Irvine and I am a COSMOS RA this year.

Can you explain your major a little more?

In my major we learn a lot about how to make policies that will help sustainability and help improve the environment and promote environmental science. In my business economics major, I learn a lot about the market and how businesses work. I decided on choosing these two majors because I am very interested in the intersection between sustainability and making business more sustainable, so sustainability and business. I feel like businesses and consumer culture, especially in our culture, is unsustainable so I want to create a way of making businesses more sustainable. 

On campus I’m involved in a lot of sustainability things. I am the accounting commissioner for The Green Initiative Fund at UCI, so I manage a fund of a hundred thousand or more that comes from undergraduate tuition and we use that to fund and give grants to sustainability projects on the campus. The undergrads come out with sustainability ideas and they submit applications and we give them money to build their ideas. For example, we’ve done water refill stations at the medical school and the ARC. We also made solar powered desks around the campus.”

How many years have you been an RA?

This is my first year. But I heard about COSMOS through my professor, Professor Crook. She’s the program manager. I think it’s a super cool opportunity–not just being an RA but also the program itself for students. I didn’t know about it when I was in high school. I wish I did because it’s a super cool thing to experience–being able to be taught by college professors and I think it really helps build students’ skills, hard skills and soft skills for college, and I wish it was an opportunity I had in high school. But I’m really happy I’m able to be an RA and be able to connect with you students and have good conversations with students. I’m really excited to see what you [students] do in the future and accomplish, so it's really great to be here with you guys.

How is housing at UCI?

I think housing is pretty good at UCI because you get 2 years of guaranteed housing. So if you’re a freshman or sophomore you’re guaranteed some type of campus housing, which is really good. The dorms themselves are pretty good. I think our dorms are pretty nice in the sense that it’s accessible. Our housing community is pretty nice, like there’s a lot of events for freshmen so you’re able to make friends easily. I think our dining hall is pretty good–even though I sometimes get sick of the food, I think they’re really good compared to other dining halls I’ve tried. I think holistically our housing is pretty good. Whenever you need to put in a work order for maintenance, people are very responsive and you have a really good maintenance crew–like cleaning crew, which I really enjoy working with because I’m an RA during the regular school year. Everyone is super intertwined because of the activities the RAs and housing put on. Housing does a really good job building community for incoming first years.

Is being a RA during the school year similar to being a RA at COSMOS?

I think even though the title is the same, COSMOS RA and student housing RA, the roles are very different. When we’re on duty as student housing RA, you are basically on call from 5 pm to 8 am the next morning, and you have to respond to all emergency situations. It can be anything–sometimes severe cases the police will come. I haven’t had that encounter with COSMOS, I know it can happen with anything. But I think that experience of being on call like that is different from COSMOS. As a COSMOS RA, obviously you have to respond to anything, anything your resident needs, but I think student housing has more students, so there’s more emergency situations. Also with COSMOS it's only a 4 week program, during the school year it's all year so there's more time for things to happen. It’s a different experience. As a regular year RA, you have to put on your own events, so you have to plan your own individual events for your hall rather than having a whole team of RAs to help you with COSMOS. There’s definitely more pressure in planning your own events. I enjoy being both a COSMOS RA and a regular year RA, I think they’re both enjoyable and fun but they’re just different in their roles.