Artifacts Covered in Dust.

"A thousand years later, a second Egyptian scribe provides a succinct curriculum: 'Write with your hand, recite with your mouth, and converse with those more knowledgeable than you.' "
--Somewhere on here

I started this project informally, in the fall of 2005, while taking Social Research Methods with Dr. Starr. Our assignment was to keep a diary for the semester. In this diary, we would follow one question, determine how we'd try to answer it through different research methods. At the time the question was, "why am I in college?" It came out to a few thousand words, most of it now possessing a purely nostalgic value for me. Over time I would continue to wrestle with trying to articulate this answer, and eventually I'd see the question as mildly irrelevant. It was no longer a why, but a how.

Below are two excerpts. Excuse the constant hyperbole and gushing excitement. It was just after freshman year and I was really fascinated by everything around me:

Week 6: The Ethnography*
So we came up with this great idea. It's more of an outsider perspective than anything else, but I think it's pretty great. So far, I've enlisted my friend John and TK. The inspiration comes from this book called "The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice," written in 1971. It does an overview of several dozen colleges in the country from a countercultural point of view: whether you can buy grass, get birth control pills and what kind of books people are reading. This particular aspect is listed under "Mental Environment." Chapman College has one sentence: "People don't read." Some things never change.

But what I want to do is get two implants at every university. Have them stay there for two years. Take courses, live in the dorms, join fraternities, get completely involved in the social life. I'd have them keep a diary for these two years, and at the end, they would consolidate all this information into one final report, the compilation of which would be turned into a giant book. Or maybe keep a website, with each author logging in information every two weeks. Or maybe one student who actually attends could write, and another who is there just for that assignment, see what kind of perspectives I'd get. This would be great to do for every university we could afford to do. It'd be brilliant. It would go beyond these stupid ratings the Princeton Review does, and would reveal some localized truth about the school, or at least lift up the curtain so people could look and say to themselves, "Jesus Christ." I'm not just interested in the "party scene," but the actual mechanics of education. How well do students organize their own education? That's the focus. I like this. It's gravy.

Week 14 Discourse Analysis
The best thing to happen to my study. I wish I had had this during the entire process. It would have been absolutely perfect for my question. I had been doing so, I guess, from the start: just mentally collecting what everyone was saying about college. I watched two episodes of The Simpsons that dealt with college; both had visions of an eastern school as models; gothic buildings, large lecture halls, an autumn-like atmosphere. This is the most common image I see whenever I see college mentioned. What kind of nostalgia does this produce, and is it responsible for my disappointment? I could have been doing so much in analyzing films that are about college and note that probably less than 10% of the movie actually takes place in the classroom. What does PCU say about the college experience? Not a single classroom scene.

Why does everyone conjure up the same imagery when the generic term, "college students" is used. This is supposedly a time for experimentation and self-discovery, but does the environment really foster this in a positive way? How do people talk about college? In a sort of "been there, done that," method, where we remove current students from the conversation. We are still in school, so we lack the perspective that the adults do when they talk about their time in school. We are never included in the discourse, unless we are on MTV or our female counterparts in Girls Gone Wild, and the multitude of "fresh-coed" websites online. Are we told that we actually have to learn? Commercials capitalize on the vision of kids going away to school, but it always focuses on the transition, like cell phone commercials, etc. What is college all about, and why do people want to come here? What disappointments are in store? I still have no answer for the general question, but I have so many starting points. I have destroyed and constructed paths to answer this question properly, which I eventually want to do.

*It appears that someone has already started their own version of this, and it's very interesting to see how it's approached and conceptualized. It's a very sleek and attractive site, which seems to be parent-friendly something that the original Underground Guide definitely wasn't. There's a book available for some colleges, with some grouped regionally. The contrasts in the work between these two eras is an investigation in itself. I am using text from the College Prowler profiles as part of corpus to study.