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Sarah Stover Reading Response 1

I thought Dr. Rebekah Nathan was a very brave woman. After fifteen years of teaching, she decided to switch roles and become the student. On top of that, she became a "new freshman" at the same university she taught at for years. She completely threw herself into the role, too. She lived in the dorms, attended classes, did homework, and joined as many activities as she could, trying to capture the freshman experience.

When she described attending Previews in the first chapter, there were two lines I thought were fantastic. They were, "As a new student, I was overwhelmed; as a professor, I was surprised to see how many groups dominated the scene and vied for student attention. As an anthropologist, I was humbled to see how little I, as a professor, knew of my students' academic world." The last line in particular stood out to me because I think it's very true that a lot of people get used to the world they know, and may not realize how extremely different someone else's world is. For example, Dr. Nathan was describing how as a professor, she thought she was pretty familiar with the layout of the campus, but after moving in the dorms, she was completely disoriented when forced to find her way around. Another interesting difference Dr. Nathan pointed out was the dialogue in different groups of people. The students had a different style and faster pace of speaking than the professors.

Throughout the second chapter, I could relate to many of the comments Dr. Nathan made. She mentioned how it was hard to believe how much stuff you could fit into a dorm room, or how the bulletin boards were filled with advertisements and information on clubs, trips, academics, or your health and body. The one concept she kept going back to was the concept of fun and how students want their college experience to be fun. I completely agree. In the future, when I look back on my own college experience, I want to be able to say that I had fun, that I laughed every day, and that I took trips to go skiing or trips to the mall.

Another great point she made was, "The real experience of 'college life,' though, was in the variation." I think this is 100% true. Each college student is going to have a different college experience, which I found to be true after doing my time diaries and taking my photos.

I did not enjoy this book as much as __My Freshman Year.__ I thought it was difficult to comprehend, and some parts went right over my head. I did think it was interesting that they compared learning ethnography to learning how to juggle, but when I thought about it did make more sense. Both are about constant learning, observing, and comparing. The authors of this book also pointed out that culture should be thought of as a verb, meaning it is "unbounded, kaleidoscopic, and dynamic." What culture isn't is a fixed thing; it's always changing or shifting. They also focused on the connection between language and culture. An ethnographer's "greatest challenge [is] to try to understand how cultural patterns support, deny, and change structures and uses of language and multimodal literacies."

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