About the Office

Your living community is an integral part of your education at Smith. Staff in the Office of Residence Life can help ensure that your co-curricular living environment enhances and enriches your overall experience.

Residential living is vital for your education, you will be living, studying and socializing with roommates, housemates and friends from around the world—all with varied and distinctive backgrounds and experiences.

Mission & Values

The mission of the Office of Residence Life is to provide housing for students that encourages community and promotes inclusion.

Core Values

Community Through Connections

Creating communities by fostering connections encourages students to reflect, explore and engage with the self and others. This should serve to develop strong and meaningful relationships in and outside the houses through common interests, shared identities and learning experiences.

Wellness

Wellness is a lifelong journey, valuing everything we are as living beings; in the full complexity of our positive and negative experiences. We are whole people moving through the world as the world moves around us; as such, these definitions must grow and change along with us. The Office of Residence Life provides opportunities for students to explore and grow in their wellness journey.

Learning

Learning is a continuous, active process of discovery that engages people in intentional inquiry and problem solving while seeking to understand in a collaborative context.

Equity and Inclusion

We are all multifaceted individuals with various and intersecting social identities. Healthy communities celebrate and honor differences and strive to be just and inclusive. Authentic inclusion requires us to challenge the systems of power and domination that keep us apart. We must learn to work across our differences to envision and create a better way of being in community together.

Adapted from Developing a Liberatory Consciousness by Dr. Barbara J. Love.