ARHS

Contact ARHS

President:	Kayla McPherson ( arhs@psu.edu )
Office:	206 HUB-Robeson Center
Phone:	814.863.2747
Fax:	814.863.3817
Meetings:	Mondays, 6:15pm, Pollock Gold Room (Pollock Commons)
Email:	arhs@psu.edu

 

About ARHS

    The Association of Residence Hall Students ( ARHS ) is the primary representative voice for the University Park residence hall community. The organization works to make sure that students in the residence halls have an experience that is more than just living in a "dorm" room. The goal is to guarantee that students have a real, true home here on campus. ARHS works with the offices of Housing, Food Services, and Residence Life to make sure that all parts of residence hall life meet students' needs. From recommending changes to the cable tv offerings, to conducting dining hall satisfaction surveys, to hosting diversity and sex education programs, ARHS does everything it can to make sure that students' needs are met while they live on campus.

    Almost 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students live on campus, and ARHS has a lot of partners throughout the University that help it meet their needs. On the administration side, our biggest partners are Housing, Food Services, and Residence Life. The relationship works both ways; ARHS lets them know the needs and wants of their customers—ARHS's constituents—and in exchange they give the organization the opportunity to help shape the rules that govern the residence hall community. It's one of the best student-administration relationships of any student group on campus.

    On the student organization side of University life, ARHS has seven main partners: the six Area Governments and the Nittany Chapter of the National Residence Hall Honorary (NRHH). The Area Governments have the same basic mission as ARHS , but they each focus their efforts on one of the six residential areas of the University Park campus: East Halls, North Halls, West Halls, South Halls, Pollock Halls, and Eastview Terrace / Nittany Apartments. Each Area works to program for and represent its residents, both to the administration directly and indirectly through ARHS Council. Council is composed of four individuals from each Area, a five-person Executive Board, and about a dozen committee chairs and liaisons. If you'd like to learn more about the Area Governments, please click on the Areas link on the side of this page and check them out.

    ARHS's other main student organization partner is its "sister" organization here on campus: the Nittany Chapter of NRHH. While ARHS and the Areas deal primarily with programming and advocacy, NRHH focuses its time and resources almost exclusively on recognition. Its membership is composed of the top 1% of the residence hall community, in terms of leadership, scholarship, and service to the residence halls. To be inducted into NRHH is a great honor, but it's by no means the only way to be recognized. Resident Assistants can be given awards for excellent programs they put on, first-year students can be recognized for outstanding leadership, and full-time staff members (be they Residence Life Coordinators or Housing Tech Service (Maintenance) staff) can be given certificates and tokens of appreciation. What it boils down to is that if someone you know has done something great for the residence halls or has just achieved something great while living in our community, NRHH wants to know about it. If you want to know more, or if you'd like to recognize someone for an achievement in the halls, just go to the "Links" section of our site and find NRHH under the "Related Organizations" section.

    That, in a nutshell, is ARHS . It's a laid-back, fun, and very productive organization. ARHS focuses on service to others through programming and advocacy, and it even administers a scholarship that Housing, ARHS , and NRHH established several years ago. The organization is a great place to have your voice heard if you are not satisfied with how things are going during your stay in the halls. If there's something you want to change, let ARHS know! We would love to hear from you and would love even more if you'd join in helping us further the mission of improving student life for on-campus students. Thanks for taking the time to check out our site, and let us know if there's any thing we can do for you or for any other part of our residence hall community.