Dazhon Darien has stepped into the director position of Student Life. The position has been open since the beginning of the semester, when the previous director, Shane O’neill left Colorado Mesa University to work for the City of Grand Junction.
Darien was one of two candidates selected to come to CMU for the final hiring process. Student leaders met with the top two candidates and voiced their impressions of both. At the end of the selection process, Darien earned the job.
“I feel honored. Whenever you’re trying to choose someone to run your Student Life division, it’s always a tricky thing because a person not only has to speak to being a competent professional in an administrator, but they also have to speak to the heartbeat of the students and understand what they want and how to achieve those goals,” Darien said.
With a new director, change may involve more than having someone new sitting in the office. Darien acknowledged that thought may make some individuals uneasy.
“The thing about change is it’s always one of those things that people, you know, they get scared of,” Darien said. “For me, there isn’t necessarily going to be changes. There’s going to be some things that we build on, improve and enhance. I think there’s some structural things we can also re-evaluate and look at.
“When you have a university that starts off at a certain size and it grows as fast as CMU did, it can sometimes leave some areas that didn’t grow and Student Life seems to be one of those, so my job is definitely to help the department grow and enhance as much as it is to change things.”
According to Darien, it’s too early to determine what is already working well and what needs to change.
“It’s only been a week, so I can’t really say what’s been working good and what I want to change and things like that,” Darien said. “But I definitely want to spend my time having the opportunity to really grow my student clubs and my student organizations.”
According to Darien, the most important aspect of his job is his relationship with the students. Student involvement is therefore a priority to him.
“If I’m not able to really engage and be student focused and student centered with everything I do, then there’s really no need for a person like myself to be the director of student life,” Darien said. “I think you have an opportunity in this position to change so many different lives. There are so many different organizations on campus, there are so many different demographics, there’s so much diversity within the department. If I can reach just one third of that population, I feel like I will have been successful.”
According to Darien, his motivation for coming to CMU changed throughout the hiring process. Originally, he was inspired by the enthusiasm he experience from some of the professional staff.
Darien said he was also motivated to go “somewhere where there’s a need and there’s an eagerness for creativity and different ideas. And then, ultimately, when I got here, it was just the opportunity to work with the student population. Every single day I’m meeting wonderful students that are definitely opening my mind to a lot of different things.”
As Darien settles into his new position, it may become more clear what he intends to change and what the new director finds to be working well already.
