My Freshman Year- What A Professor Learned By Becoming A Student by Rebekah Nathan is about a college professor who investigates college students’ lifestyle in their freshman year. There has been many times when college professors have assigned a great deal of work and expected it to be due in a short period of time. To the professors, they may think a week is enough time. However, to students like myself it looks to be only two or three days. As college students, especially in our freshman year, we have a lot of pressure. We have about three to four classes, school activities, and of course, our own personal lives. Sometimes college professors may fail to remember that this is a point in student’s lives where they have a great deal of responsibility but little time to cope with the new circumstances. There is peer pressure, lack of concentration, and so much going on all at one time. Many times professors wonder why students cheat, be rude, less motivated, careless of their work. A college professor Cathy Small goes by the pseudonym name Rebekah Nathan in attempt to see what it is really like to be in a college student’s place.
Rebekah Nathan is a cultural anthropologist in her mid-fifties. In order to do her studies on college students, Rebekah returns to her old college, AnyU to register as a college student. She states that she would only tell people more information unless they asked her what things she plans to do at the university. Her response would be to teach and do research. Before she returned as a “college student,” she went through mock questions with her friends so that she would be prepared to answer questions from people that would try to meet her. Although her answers were not entirely true, they did buil...
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...kay and when cheating was acceptable. One person said, “Excuse me, but there are worse things to do than cheat on homework.” (Nathan, 125) She noticed that over half of the students who responded thought that cheating depends on the situation or circumstance.
Bibliography
Nathan, R. (2006). Welcome to "AnyU". My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student (pp. 7,8,11). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). Community and Diversity. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (p. 54). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). Academically Speaking. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (p. 105). London: Penguin Books.
Nathan, R. (2006). The Art of College Management. My freshman year: what a professor learned by
becoming a student (pp. 119,125). London: Penguin Books.
Mike Rose met many struggling students at UCLA’s Tutorial Center, the Writing Research Project, and the school’s Summer program. He first describes the loneliness students feel upon arriving at college, and that as they try to find themselves, they all to often lose themselves because they are bombarded with ideas that are so foreign to them. He introduces his audiences to Andrea, a bright young girl out of high school who, despite hours of memorizing in her textbook, could not obtain a passing grade on her Chemistry mid-term. How is this possible if she spent so much time studding? Rose explains that she failed because in college, and in this course in particular, it is not enough for a student to know the material, but rather, to be able to apply it in a various amount of problems. Yet the problem Andrea faces is that she was never taught this in high school.
Every fall millions of American adolescents gear up to apply for the thousands of colleges and universities across the nation. For many students this process is a simple-natural progression through a linear educational track in which no extra preparation, beyond a paper application, is required. However, for many students college preparation can begin as early as conception. Alexandria Robbins follows the stories of nine students from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Whitman is known for and could be summarized by a simple term in which Robbins’ book is also titled: Overachievers. The author explores the hectic nature of helicopter parenting, bureaucratic admission processes, the culture of Ivy (a term describing the upper echelon of academic institutions), unrelenting and unrealistic expectations, and the cyclonic degradation of innocent and carefree adolescent development.
In a society where a collegiate degree is almost necessary to make a successful living, the idea that a student cares less about the education and more about the “college experience” can seem baffling. In My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, Rebekah Nathan, the author’s pseudonym, tackles the idea that academics are less impactful on a student then the culture of college life. Nathan, a 50-year-old cultural anthropologist and university professor, went undercover as a college freshman for a research project. From her research, she hoped to better understand the undergraduate experience by fully immersing herself in college life. To do this, she anonymously applied to “AnyU,” a fake acronym for a real university,
Van Harken, Joseph. "Budgets Cut Student Experience." CNN.com. 20 Aug. 2003. Web. 25 Mar. 2010. .
Coming to college as an adult, we have many expectations and preconceptions of what college will or will not be. The expectations we have can influence our college life for the better or the worse. My experience since starting college has been an interesting one. People have misconceptions about college because they do not know what to expect. After doing some research, I have concluded that there are three major factors that are often misunderstood about college life. The first is the financial aspect of college. Second, is the relationship between the professors and students. Third is time management. These three factors play an important role in why people are afraid to go down the path to college.
In Paul Toughmay’s “Who Gets to Graduate,” he follows a young first year college student, Vanessa Brewer, explaining her doubts, fears, and emotions while starting her college journey. As a student, at the University of Texas Brewer feels small and as if she doesn’t belong. Seeking advice from her family she calls her mom but after their conversation Brewer feels even more discouraged. Similar to Brewer I have had extreme emotions, doubts, and fears my freshman year in college.
In Jennie Capo Crucet 's essay, “Taking My Parents To College,” Crucet describes her own experience as a freshman college student who was faced with many challenges that were unknown to her, as well as the cluelessness of what the beginning of her freshman year would look like. I felt like the biggest impression Crucet left on me while I was reading her essay, was the fact that I can relate to her idea of the unknown of college life. Throughout her essay, she described her personal experiences, and the factors one might face as a freshman college student which involved the unknown and/or uncertainty of what this new chapter would bring starting freshman year of college. Crucet’s essay relates to what most of us
N. p. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2011. Print. The. Moran, Darcie.
Nathan performed many observational studies that compelled her to voice the disparity between the formal and informal areas of college life. The "undergraduate worldview" (112) is composed of an in-class, intellectual side that goes vastly unnoticed beside the behemoth that entails living in an environment filled with thousands of young adults. The partying, dorm life, and other non-school sanctioned aspects of living in unsupervised quarters encompass both a student’s time and mental capacities. She found that a majority of conversations surrounded topics of sports, the opposite sex, and TV shows. They find solace in the communal suffrage of going to class and seldom discuss how difficult classes can be. This demeans the intellectual side of college by turning the topic against cl...
Rebekah Nathan starts her undercover anthropological study with the a couple of research questions: “What is the current culture at AnyU (my pseudonym for my university) as an example of the American public university? How do contemporary American students understand their education, and what do they want from it? How do they negotiate college life? What
When entering college freshman students face difficulties by not knowing how to adjust to the new expectations college brings. A freshman student tends to approach college with the same mentality used throughout their high school years. But as the first semester start, they encounter a variety of challenges, including having to change their study habits and knowing how to wisely manage their time. The book “The Elements of Learning” by B. Banner, Jr., and C. Cannon, introduces the elements a student must possess in order be successful in college. The research made by my team, “Collin’s Angels”, will determine important factors for freshman success, and the changes that a student makes in order to succeed through the first year of college.
Nathan, R. (2005). My freshman year: What a professor learned by becoming a student. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Measured by recent surveys, cheating has reached epidemic proportions in high schools and colleges. In a survey of 21,000 students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, 70 percent of high school students and 54 percent of middle schoolers admitted that they had cheated on an exam. That is up sharply from a study cited in "The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next," edited by Urie Bronfenbrenner and others.. That study found that 33.8 percent of high school students used a "cheat sheet" on a test in 1969. By 1989 the percentage had risen to 67.8. Furthermore, 58.3 percent of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5 percent did so in 1989.
Modern students face many pressures for academic success. They are often unwilling to disappoint their parents or spouses. Some fear that not cheating will weaken a student’s ability to compete with their peers. They rationalize their unethical behavior, unwilling to accept a poor grade, consequently justifying cheating as the only means to that end.
"The Freshmen fifteen" is one of the most dreaded rights of passage into college. It is a well-known fact among college students, that one gains fifte...