Our history

Launch

ResidentAssistant.com goes online as a resource site for resident assistants. Its pages from this era were hand-built in FrontPage.

First wave of press

Coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2/21/00, "New Site Offers Advice for Resident Advisors"), The Daily Iowan (2/16/00, "RAs Get Their Day"), and Microsoft bCentral (2/14/00). A 2/9/00 press release marked an international RA recognition day. The site then reported over 160,000 page views a month (January 2000, per its own press release; read the release).

Matrix magazine

Matrix magazine ran a cover interview, "On the Front Lines: A Conversation With Resident Assistant Dan Oltersdorf."

Growth claims

Newsletters of the time said the site received 200,000–500,000 page views a month. These are the site's own claims at the time, not audited figures.

National coverage

USA TODAY ran David Bellis’s story on RAs as crisis managers (online 4/22/2002 as "Resident assistants morph into crisis managers"; the 4/23/2002 print reprint was headlined "Students morph into crisis managers"). Student Leader magazine also named the site among its best student web sites in spring 2002, and said the monthly newsletter had 5,000 subscribers.

Election programming

A dedicated 2004 election section offered voter-education bulletin boards and programs. See it

Joomla redesign

An experiment with a content-management version of the site. Preserved pages

Final design

The last version added social links and a large library of bulletin boards. Open it

Still online

The site was still live as recently as 2019, more than two decades after it launched.

Back online

Dan wanted this resource live again, so it was rebuilt as a free, permanent resource for the RA community.