Photo from Covenant College
Over the summer, Covenant students received three email updates from Brad Voyles, informing them of various maintenance projects, tech upgrades, and new hires on campus. One of these new hires is Becca Moore, who joined the Student Development staff this fall. Although she is new to the position of “Coordinator of Student Success,” Moore is no stranger to the Covenant community. She worked in Priesthill last year.
“I was really blessed to get a counseling internship here [at Priesthill],” said Moore. “It was a pretty competitive one, and I was so thankful to get it because it introduced me to Covenant in a really raw and beautiful way.”
By serving at Priesthill, Moore was also able to complete her master’s practicum for Clinical Mental Health Counseling, a degree she pursued at Richmont Graduate University in Chattanooga. As she met and worked with students at Covenant, Moore began meeting with Student Development.
“Counselors collaborate with Student Development in order to discuss how best to care for the students who come to us,” said Moore. “It was through those discussions that I first met Janet [Hulsey], Jon [Wylie], Brad [Voyles], and Sarah [Ocando].”
In order to maintain patient confidentiality, Moore and other Priesthill counselors never shared the names of or any specific details concerning the students who visited them, only the general issues their students were coming in for. The goal of these meetings was to gauge general student needs on campus and discuss how best to address those needs.
“Student Development really cares about helping students in every way that they can,” said Moore. “It’s this really beautiful collaboration because we’re all on the same team when it comes to helping students. We ask questions like ‘How can we care for campus well? How can we care for students well?’”
Through careful collaboration, Moore and Student Development sought to offer the best services they could to the Covenant student body. It was through this collaboration and through her work in Priesthill that Moore grew to know and love the community at Covenant. When Janet Hulsey announced that she would be stepping down, Moore was encouraged to apply for the position, and happily accepted the job offer.
This fall, as she works alongside Graduate Assistant Caroline Reeves in the Center for Student Success, Moore has taken the opportunity to spread the word about the services that the Center provides. Whether it’s speaking at the beginning of a PE class or introducing herself to O-teams, Moore is eager to raise awareness about the help provided in a tucked-away corner of Kresge Library.
“We serve about 14% of campus. That help includes both testing and classroom accommodations, as well as just general academic support. But beyond even that we provide just general support, because student success is not just about the classroom; it’s about your whole person.”
When asked to expound a bit on her interaction with students at Covenant, Moore said, “I feel like a lot of students have this hidden fear that we can’t talk about stuff, that we can’t be honest because we’re supposed to have it all together. My heart is for the student that is stuck in the middle of hard questions because [in the midst of that] it’s really hard to focus in class or to care about what you’re learning about.”
She continued, “One thing I try to tell students is that you don’t have to have it all together because you can’t have it all together. And there’s so much freedom in that. There’s so much beauty in giving yourself grace and giving grace to other people. [Trying to achieve perfection] is just like running yourself into a wall: it doesn’t work.”
As Moore works to encourage students, she has in turn found herself encouraged by her fellow Student Development staff as well as by the students themselves:
“One of the biggest blessings for me about working here at Covenant is being able to look up to my co-workers [Brad Voyles, Nesha Evans, and Jon Wylie] as role models. Watching them encourages me to do a better job here [at Student Success]. I also love observing the resiliency of Covenant students, of getting to be a front-row witness to what God is doing in students’ lives and how he is pursuing them in really hard things. Seeing that, I see how in turn he’s using those things to pursue me.”
For students interested in utilizing the help offered by Moore and the Center for Student Success, Moore encourages visitors to drop by her niche on the second floor of Kresge Library, just to the left of the Writing Center. Be it to study, chat, or grab a snack, students of all grades are welcome.