Erin Duffy, Director of Residential Life

In addition to being the director of residential life, Ms. Duffy also teaches Classics at Taft. When she’s not teaching Latin or overseeing the dorms, she likes playing golf, doing crosswords, and spending time with family. Ms. Duffy lives on campus with her wife, Riann, their two children, and their dog. Here, in her own words, she shares her thoughts about residential life at Taft.

I came to Taft in 2012 after serving as the residential life director at a boarding school in California. I’ve lived in every dorm imaginable (lower school boys, mid boys, senior girls, upper mid, and senior girls) in my time at boarding schools, and feel that the dorms are what make schools like Taft such amazing places. I love the tremendous feeling of community that is evident on a daily basis at Taft, but especially in the dorms. Faculty apartments are right in the middle of things in the dorms, which allows students to forge tremendous relationships with dorm faculty that last well beyond graduation. I believe in the intentional connections that faculty form with students in the dorms, as students grow comfortable having faculty be a part of their daily lives.

One of the things I love most about my job as director of residential life is interacting with the student monitors. The monitors run through two days of rigorous training prior to new students arriving for the first time, and this is when residential faculty and monitors start to bond as dorm teams. Once the school year gets off and running, I pay close attention to life in the dorms through weekly meetings with dorm heads as well as communicating regularly with the Deans' Office. I work with dorm heads to facilitate any evening programming such as dorm meetings, monitor sponsored student events, goal setting sessions, or even Q&A sessions for new students. We work hard to make the dorms at Taft warm, safe, ordered, and fun, since they truly are students' homes away from home!