A Love Letter to Student Affairs

by Claire L. Brady, EdD

In honor of Careers in Student Affairs Month, I’ve been thinking about how I ended up here.

Not here as in my current job. Here as in this remarkable field that I have now called home for nearly three decades.

I caught the bug as a student leader at Michigan State University, although I didn’t know enough then to call it a career. I just knew there were people on a college campus whose job seemed to be helping students find their place, become leaders, navigate hard things, build communities, and discover versions of themselves they hadn’t quite met yet.

Turns out, you could make a life doing that.

As a young hall director at Alma College, I knew I had found the right field. I loved the proximity to students and the wonderful unpredictability of the work. I loved that on any given day you might be developing a student leader, responding to a crisis, planning something that brought a community together, solving a problem no one anticipated, or sitting across from a student who simply needed someone to believe they could figure out what came next.

But what really made me fall in love with student affairs was the people.

At Alma, Michigan State, and the University of Illinois, student affairs professionals like Marty Stack, Allyn Shaw, and Marc Goldman poured into me. They taught me how to do the work, certainly, but they also taught me how to be in the work. I watched people lead with integrity when nobody was watching, make extraordinarily complicated decisions while keeping students at the center, use research and theory to inform practice, and somehow combine rigor with deep humanity. They challenged me, trusted me, gave me opportunities before I was entirely sure I was ready for them, and showed me what it meant to develop other people while continuing to grow yourself.

That is still one of the things I love most about this field.

Call it student affairs, student services, student success, student life, or whatever your institution has decided to put on the organizational chart this year. The magic has never been in the name. It is in the people and in the work.

It is in the residence life professional who notices a student disappearing from community before anyone else does. The career advisor helping a student imagine a future they didn’t know was available to them. The conduct professional holding accountability and development in the same conversation. The student activities advisor staying late because leadership development rarely happens conveniently between 8 and 5. The financial aid, basic-needs, counseling, accessibility, orientation, advising, fraternity and sorority life, multicultural affairs, recreation, enrollment, and student success professionals who understand that what looks like one interaction to us can become a turning point for a student.

And behind those moments is far more expertise than our field sometimes gets credit for. Student affairs is built on research, assessment, theory, ingenuity, judgment, and an extraordinary ability to translate what we know about students into environments where they can learn, belong, persist, lead, and thrive. Some of the most creative problem-solvers I have ever known work in this field, often solving complicated human problems with limited resources, competing priorities, and very little fanfare.

My own relationship with this work has changed over the years. At Lake-Sumter State College and Ana G. Méndez University, I found my authentic leadership voice and began to understand the broader impact we could have when student experience was treated not as a collection of programs and services, but as central to institutional strategy. Today, as a consultant and coach, and as a co-founder of AHECC, my vantage point is different again. I get to work across institutions, coach leaders, help teams navigate change, and support other consultants and coaches who are extending their own impact across higher education.

And somehow, from this vantage point, I love student affairs even more.

I see how much this field knows. I see the ingenuity that emerges when resources are tight and student needs are enormous. I see professionals adapting to changing demographics, new technologies, questions about the value of higher education, growing expectations, and challenges none of us were trained to anticipate. And through all of it, I see people continuing to ask some version of the same question that drew me to this work in the first place: What do students need from us now?

There is something profoundly hopeful about choosing a career built around the belief that people can grow. That belonging matters. That environments shape outcomes. That a conversation can change a trajectory. That education is about more than what happens in a classroom, and that helping someone become who they are capable of becoming is work worthy of a career.

So during Careers in Student Affairs Month, this is my love letter to the field that raised me, challenged me, gave me a leadership voice, and continues to give me ways to contribute.

But mostly, it is a love letter to the people. To those who poured into me, those I have had the privilege to pour into, and those just discovering that, remarkably, you can make a life doing this.

I found a career. I found a community. And, in so many ways, I found home.

And after nearly three decades, I’m still excited to see where this field takes us next.

What a remarkable way to spend a career: helping people become who they are capable of becoming.