Belonging in Practice: How Residential Life at LUMS Trains its Leaders
Embarking on a journey of transformation: How a six-day intensive program turned 25 students into a powerful leadership cohort.
Every August, thousands of new admission students move into hostels and dormitories around the world. And in most of those residences, there is a student — often nervous, often undertrained — whose job it is to make sure everyone feels okay. At LUMS, we call them Floor Advisors. This past summer, we decided to take their preparation seriously in a way we hadn’t quite done before. What emerged was a six-day training week that was less a set of orientations and more a small experiment in what student leadership development could be. Here is what we did, what surprised us, and what we learned.
The Problem We Were Solving
Floor Advisors (FAs) at LUMS Residential Life are not wardens or administrators. They are peer mentors students one or two years ahead of their fellow residents —who are expected to notice when someone is struggling, connect them to the right support, hold space for conflict, and build community on their floor. That is a remarkable amount of responsibility for a 20-year-old. In previous years, preparation for this role was patchy at best. FAs received some briefings, a few handouts, and then got thrown into Day Zero, the chaotic, high-energy first day when hundreds of new students arrive on campus simultaneously. We wanted something better. Something that would give FAs not just information, but confidence. Not just protocols, but relationships. So we built a week.
What We Built
The 2025 Floor Advisors Training Week brought together 25 student leaders across all four Residential Communities for five days of structured preparation, closing with a formal recognition ceremony. We partnered with three campus units: the LUMS Learning Institute (LLI), Counselling and Psychological Services (CAPS), and Sports, Wellness & Recreation (SWR) to co-design sessions that moved across a deliberate arc:
Day 1 — Role Clarity
We started not with a lecture but with case studies. Real hostel dilemmas: a student having a breakdown at midnight, roommates in a culture clash, an FA who kept saying yes until they burned out. Small groups debated what to do. The message was simple: your job is to connect, not to fix.
Day 2 — The Scavenger Hunt
Instead of a slide deck about campus support services, we sent teams out across campus with case-based prompts. “A student reports harassment, which office is responsible? Find it, photograph it, record the address.” Mixed-RC teams raced across the university, physically locating every office they would later need to recommend to residents. The mental maps they built that afternoon stuck in ways a PowerPoint never would.
Day 3 — Identity, Values & Time
Facilitated by Eilya Mohsin from LLI, FAs worked through an identity wheel exercise mapping gender, class, language, religion, and other dimensions of self before discussing in small, mixed groups how those identities shape life in shared spaces. In the afternoon, a practical time management workshop helped each FA build their own Google Calendar system using their actual university schedule. The evening ended on a hockey ground, with SWR running cooperative games that quietly revealed who communicates well under pressure.
Day 4 — Community Mapping
Each RC team was given large chart paper and asked to draw their hostel then mark the friction points. Kitchens. Bathrooms. Laundry rooms. Noise at 2am. Teams identified which problems were infrastructure issues (route to Housing via HESK) and which were behavioral (route to ResLife interventions). They brainstormed student-driven social contracts. RC4 designed a kitchen clear-out policy. RC1 proposed SOPs to post on common room walls.
Day 5 — Mental Health & Care Pathways
CAPS facilitated role-plays on supporting distressed students empathetic listening, recognizing risk, and knowing when to refer. The session raised awareness even as participants pushed back for more: they wanted clearer emergency protocols, specific contacts, and hostel-specific escalation steps. That feedback shaped our follow-up resources.
Day 6 — Ceremony
We closed not with an evaluation but with a dinner. Personalized scrolls. Certificates for partners. Speeches. Laughter. It sounds small, but the room felt genuinely different from how it had on Day 1 quieter then, richer now. That shift was the point.
The Pedagogy Behind It
The week was framed around BOPPPS (Bridge-in, Objectives, Pre-assessment, Participatory learning, Post-assessment, Summary) a model that keeps learning active, not passive. Every session opened with a real scenario. Every session closed with structured reflection. Handouts followed doing, not the other way around.
We also made a deliberate choice to hold back on information overload. Rather than front-loading FAs with event checklists and administrative workflows before they had even met their residents, we offered glimpses of the digital infrastructure: the ResLife Notion portal, the reporting system, the event calendar. Enough to orient, not enough to overwhelm. The philosophy was simple: hands-on before handouts, specificity over slides, community before content.
How It Helped Them
By the end of the Fall semester, we circulated a feedback form to all Floor Advisors reflecting on their year so far. What came back was telling. FAs reported that the training week had meaningfully improved two things in particular:
- Their ability to connect students to services. The scavenger hunt, the case studies, and the CAPS session had together given them a working mental map of campus support who does what, where to go, and how to phrase the referral. When a student came to them struggling, they knew the next step.
- Their knowledge of the hostel itself. The community mapping exercise had given FAs a clearer, more detailed picture of their Residential Community its physical layout, its recurring pressure points, its informal social dynamics. That clarity made them more confident in their day-to-day role. Beyond the functional outcomes, something less measurable also happened. Participants described feeling inducted not just trained. The cohort that had been quiet strangers on Day 1 had become a network by Day 6, with cross-RC relationships that carried into the semester.
“The energy shift from Day 1 to that dinner was incredible we started quiet, we ended as a well-gelled group regardless of RC.”
— FA Reflection
What We Would Do Differently
Honesty matters here. Not everything landed. The mental health session needed more operational depth, FAs wanted specific emergency steps, not just empathy frameworks. The training was designed as one track for all RCs, but freshman and sophomore/junior residents have different needs; future iterations will differentiate. And the community mapping exercise, as powerful as it was, needed a built-in follow-through step: a mechanism for translating student-generated insights into actual rules posted on hostel walls. These are not failures. They are the residue of trying something new and listening carefully to what students told us.
Why This Matters Beyond LUMS
Universities everywhere are grappling with the same question: how do we support student wellbeing at scale, when professional staff can only reach so far? Peer leaders are part of the answer. But only if they are genuinely prepared. The LUMS Floor Advisors Training Week is not a perfect model. It is a living one shaped each year by what participants tell us, what works on the ground, and what the student affairs field is learning about how people actually develop leadership capacity. What we are most confident about is this: training that respects student partners as co-creators, not just recipients, produces leaders who are more confident, more connected, and more capable of caring for their communities.
That is not a small thing.
