Resident Assistant’s ‘Murals’ project brightens Alumni basement

Kelechi “KC” Onuoha works on upgrading the Alumni Hall basement walls recently. (photos by Kaylee Sayers ’23)

Kelechi “KC” Onuoha, a junior biology and philosophy major from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, has been a Resident Assistant (RA) at Saint Michael’s College since her sophomore year in Alumni Hall, a dorm housing first-years and sophomores. A recent creative project there called “Murals on a Mission” demonstrated just how much she cares about “her” students.

The residence hall has not had a renovation in 50 years, and the negative language she hears on campus about Alumni motivated Onuoha to make a change. She petitioned Jeff Vincent, the director of Residential Life, for a budget to renovate Alumni Hall’s basement by painting murals on the previously dull yellow walls, which now are a crisp white with colorful affirmations and student hand prints covering the surface.

She said her desire to become an RA arose during her time as a first-year student on campus. “I loved my first-year RA,” Onuoha said, “but she really wasn’t available… especially given the struggles of a student of color on campus. I just needed that support. I became an RA to be the RA that I would have wanted as a first-year.”

Affirmations such as these on a wall are part of the Alumni basement improvements.

Students who know her say Onuoha pours her heart and soul into her work as an RA. She cares deeply about her residents and wants them to succeed. That commitment to make Alumni Hall a positive and welcoming environment for its residents inspired the recent “Murals on a Mission” Uplift event.

“Alumni has been called ‘the slums,’ it’s been called ‘ghetto…’ and I saw all these residents who were wonderful people who were brilliant, talented, all these skillful people,” she said. “The condition of the place where we lived didn’t match the quality of the people who were living there.” By intentionally using positive language – actual words appear on the walls with the bright new color schemes in the basement renovation — she hopes to inspire a lasting legacy of positive rather than negative language about Alumni Hall around campus.

One ultimate goal, she said, is to inspire students to “go into this space that’s artistic and colorful, and start creating [their] own ideas to propel [their] lives forward.”