Student Life

I just finished reading My Freshman Year, by Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym) an anthropology professor who registered as a freshman to see what current student life is like. I’m not putting it on my list on the side of the blog, because I don’t think it revealed much that isn’t mostly obvious. Her main conclusion is that students have many competing issues they have to deal with (classes, jobs, relationships, clubs, family, etc.) and so they constantly have to juggle and prioritize. Wait, does this mean that my class is not the most important thing in my students’ lives? What a letdown.

One conclusion I did find interesting, however, is that universities strive to create a sense of community, but then encourage student participation in a massively wide variety of activities that spread students thin and therefore end up decreasing that sense of community.