Residents Assistants (RAs), the student paraprofessionals who serve as live-in, frontline staff in residence halls, have been called "the foundation of nearly every residence hall program across the country” (Blimling, 2003, p. ix). Although the RA position is not ubiquitous internationally, there are similar positions in many institutions abroad (see, for example, Cousineau & Chambers, 2015, for a description of RAs in Canada). Almost all U.S. college and university housing operations use resident assistants (Bowman & Bowman, 1995; Carns, Carns, & Wright, 1993); they plan and implement programming, enforce policy, mediate conflict between students, and refer students to campus resources (Blimling, 2003). As the college student population has become increasingly diverse and as many students come to college with or develop increasingly serious psychological problems (Kisch, Leino, & Silverman, 2005; Kitzrow, 2003), the job of the RA has become more complex (Jaeger & Caison, 2006; Paladino, Murray, Newgent, & Gohn, 2005; Taub & Servaty-Seib, 2011).