Title:Helping students feel at home on the Hilltop

Georgetown Magazine recently met with Eleanor J.B. Daugherty, who joined the university as the vice president for student affairs in January 2023. Her focus is on helping students thrive at the university from orientation through commencement.

Tell me about the Division of Student Affairs? What does it encompass?

I like to think that Student Affairs is where we meet you as you leave the classroom. It encompasses how you live on campus, how you make campus your own, and how we care for you.

Our staff helps with everything from new student orientation to graduation. They also support Georgetown families and students encountering challenges by providing such services as bridge housing and a food pantry.

How are you enabling student success?

I am exceedingly proud of and excited by the way we are using scholarship to help students thrive at Georgetown. Our research in the psychology of “belonging” is becoming a toolkit for how we welcome and support students in the residence halls—through orientation and through the use of peer mentorship models that allow students to be successful and learn from one another. There’s a very real integration of theory and practice. We want cura personalis, or care of the whole person, to be something that is manifest and real in the student experience.

How do Georgetown’s Jesuit values affect the student experience?

We are all here because we believe in helping others. I see students wanting to be part of something greater than themselves. Georgetown’s values have been its foundation during the hardest of times. And every day we get to build on that.

What would you like to tell students?

Students need to know how much we believe in them. Though the world is more complicated than it was even five years ago, we are more inspired by the students we see every day. We believe they will transform the future, and we see ourselves as catalysts in their transformation. They are what fuel us.