Who's New in Tubman Hall?

By Brittany N. Gaddy

Spectrum Staff Writer

Making a positive impact in a student’s life is what Tamia Davis’s job is all about.

Davis is the new resident director (RD) of Tubman Hall at Bowie State University. She hopes to help her residents in any way possible.

A native Philadelphian, Davis is confident that her background and past experiences have prepared her to make her mark on student life at Bowie State. “I’m really here to like relate to the students...and [to] be able to help them get through this time,” she said.

Davis studied mass communications at Lincoln University, she said, to become a personal representative or music manager. She was also on the bowling team.

Currently, Davis said that she is finishing her master’s degree in educational leadership and wants to begin earning a doctoral degree in higher education in the fall.

Davis has experience working with students from her college years at Lincoln. “I worked in residence life all four years,” she said. During her first year, Davis worked as a desk assistant. However, she worked as a resident assistant (RA) for the last three years of college.

“My college career is actually what...prepared me to do this position,” Davis said.

But she didn’t always want to be a resident director. “I don’t think like anybody grows up and says, ‘I want to be an RD,”’ she said. “It’s really something that you find out that you’re interested in.”

After undergraduate school, Davis moved to Atlanta to find a job in broadcasting or marketing. “I was going through probably the hardest time in my life,” she said about the experience of not finding jobs in those fields.

“I just had to like stop and think back to what made me happy in life,” Davis said.

A former resident director at Lincoln remembered Davis as an “amazing RA” and encouraged her to apply for the RD position there, Davis said.

Before becoming a resident director at Bowie State, Davis said that she worked at Lincoln University and Shippensburg University.

“Never in a million years would I think that I would work here,” Davis said about working at Bowie State, which is Lincoln’s rival school. “But [an HBCU] is really what helped mold me into the woman I am today. So I decided that I definitely wanted to keep giving that back.”

Davis said that she enjoys “helping [students] fulfill their goals in life.”

In her free time, Davis enjoys being with her friends and family. “I’m really like family and [friend] oriented,” she said. “So I’m really...huge with spending time with my friends and my family instead of like going out.”

She also likes to shop. “It’s pretty much an addiction,” Davis said.

Davis has ambitions of working in other areas of campus life. According to Davis, she would like to become a dean of students and “maybe even one day be the vice president of student affairs.”

“I’m here to help students,” Davis said.