Kevin Davis's Essay Does Coming To College Mean Becoming Someone New?

In order to successfully enter and maintain membership status in an academic discourse community, one must be willing to make changes in order to be successful. Kevin Davis describes the changes as a creation of a new identity and explains this through his personal experiences and several studies in his essay, “Does Coming to College Mean Becoming Someone New?” His reasons for the creation of a new identity leads to the main message of how to become a successful member of an academic discourse community. However, his piece not only presents a how-to succeed guide, but also legitimizes the “college”-coming of age passage. In the process of coming to college, when entering a new community of academic discourse, a new identity is born from maturation or the rite of passage.

When one enters a new academic discourse community, they experience a rite of passage, a coming-of-age passage. The rite of passage is the process of the individual’s detachment from their former community, preparation for this new phase of life, and the reappearance into society except with a new status. In this case, the new status is student of higher learning. In any case, the rite of

This phenomenon of self-awareness can be explained with the social psychological concept of the looking glass self by Charles Horton Cooly, an esteemed sociologist. Our self-image comes from our own self-reflection and from what others think of us. For example, Charlotte notes that she was biased in her previous perspective. She did not make this realization until she began her “social” studies. Both Charlotte and Kevin Davis underwent a specific self-realization- they became self-aware of how their original identity did not fit within this new academic discourse community because of their self-reflection, the looking glass-self. Therefore, in order to separate from their former group, one must be aware that they need to separate in the first