When many students get to campus, they're so lost and scared (whether they will admit it or not) that they cling to whomever they marginally know. "Oh, hey! I sat three seats behind you in U.S. History our sophomore year of high school." "Yeah, I vaguely remember that." "Can we make each other feel less lonely for the next couple weeks?" "Sure." Nobody ever explicitly has one of those kinds of conversations with anyone, but the dynamic among newly-arrived freshmen is similar. I remember going to IHOP with a couple people at some absurd hour of the night my first day here. I knew maybe four of the dozen people, and those I knew, I think I have talked with them perhaps ten times since. Not because we don't like each other, but we all found a support network and friends in other places. Acquaintances can be like your best friends when you're surrounded by strangers.
Once I found college organizations and people with whom I shared much in common, things became easier. One of the biggest differences I noticed between high school and college is interaction among students of different ages. I would say that 95% of my friends in high school were in my same grade. Part of the reason is that high school is much more linear and standardized with its curriculum. In college, I began to make friends with people of many different ages. It didn't matter that I was 18. It didn't matter that some people were 22 and sometimes even older than that. The four years between 14 and 18 and much greater than the four years between 18 and 22. Hence, the college experience for me seemed immediately to be much more community oriented. I had frequent conversations with people who had more experience than me, and I learned a lot about what was to come. Without realizing it, I was drawn into the largest game of telephone ever started.
Most of you have played telephone, but for the sake of not assuming, I'll give a quick explanation. In telephone, one person chooses a message to whisper to the person next to them. That person in turn whispers it to the person next to them, and so on, and so on until the last person receives the message. By that point, if the original message chosen was long or crazy enough, the message is quite different. At college, the game of telephone is similar, but obviously much more complicated. The idea is the same: passing a message along. "Gameplay" is different: no one knows what the original message was; there are countless messages being circulated; each person adds their own experience to the life of the message. Maybe you think this is a stretch, but just think of a pair of cans connected with a length of string and an iPhone: they're essentially the same... except for a bunch of differences.
When you get to college, you begin to be told things by those who have more experience. I think most people, unless they are unfortunate enough to have no older friends, have this experience. "Beware the freshman fifteen!" "Don't sell your textbooks back to the bookstores. They give you nothing." "MATH 347 is a weed out course. If you make it through okay, you'll be fine." The truth of some of the statements is questionable, but I would say that a majority of the advice I received was helpful, or at least worth thinking about. My friends who had been on campus for longer than I had been were informally acting as mentors to me. I was their appreciative apprentice. Some of what they said, I passed on to others ("Beware the freshman fifteen!"); some, I ignored ("You don't want to minor in anthropology if your major is math."); other messages, I created on my own and continue to pass on ("Avoid a senior crisis and do some of the things you've always wanted to do now, like join an a cappella group!") Mentoring relationships on campus aren't hard to come by, and most of us are in them; we just don't realize we are.
Tying mentorship of some sort into ANTH 143 (our project), would be fantastic. If we could link students who have taken a course with those who are currently taking it, we eliminate the difficult task of finding someone with the type of knowledge you would like a mentor to have. If we can bring some formality and structure to the mentoring relationship, maybe it will be more effective. I think that when you're trying out something new, success is measured by how well you were able to implement your idea. Let's say I put something into place the best I can, and it flops. Success! I found out that's not the way to go. I hope that whatever we come up with for ANTH 143 works out and helps both the former and current students, but if even if it doesn't, we will have tried something new. The next pioneers have one fewer option they need to consider when thinking of how to make the largest game of telephone the best game of telephone.
2 comments:
I hope you're feeling better.
I liked your first paragraph very much. I think you nailed it for pretty much everyone, though some people hid it better than others.
I didn't get, however, the bit about telephone and how that related to the rest of your piece. Some transition sentence is needed, or so it seems to me.
You describe mentoring in a bit of a different way than I'd conceive it. In my view it's not so much that the more junior student needs information, rather it is that the student needs help to work through a decision and to validate his own decision process. Information may very flow in that setting, but the crux of the matter id decision making and getting the mentee to have a realistic feeling that he is making a good choice.
I'm still sick, but feeling better. Thanks.
The transition was supposed to be at the end of the second paragraph. It's just that telephone is about passing on messages from person to person, and I think that a lot of the advice that mentors give is information they at one point received from someone else. When I was thinking about the "freshman fifteen" message, it seemed to be something that's just passed on without any sort of thinking.
I admit that I stretch the definition of mentoring. In this game of telephone, I think that a lot of the advice is given to reassure more inexperienced students and help them make better decisions. Of course, that doesn't go for all of it. Some of it is just funny or "Urbanan legend." Pun intended.
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