We four English 110 students, Clare Koopmans, Liz Diede, DJ Nichols, and Sam Smugala, were interested in the non-fiction book My Freshman Year because we can easily relate an anthropological study of college freshman culture to our own lives. We can easily make connections between Nathan’s observations and our own experiences, but our main reason for reading this text was to understand how college professors—those who spend hours teaching our classes every year—perceive their students.
Our previous knowledge of this study on college freshman would be that we are the actual culture that is being studied, meaning that we have already spent six months immersed in the studied culture. Before coming to college, however, we had heard about this culture through the book 1,001 Things Every College Student Needs to Know by Harry H. Harrison Jr. and other various texts that are created to inform incoming freshman about college social norms. The only other related anthropological study to the culture in My Freshman Year we could think of is the movie Never Been Kissed, starring Drew Barrymore. Barrymore plays a columnist who goes back to high school to understand the culture.
As we read this text, we anticipate that our greatest difficulty will be to observe Nathan’s work separately from our own experiences. Because we are a part of the culture that she is analyzing, we will constantly want to compare her experiences and judgments of college culture to the similar experiences that we are having today. Although it’s beneficial to compare our experiences, we will have to control our biased view of the culture and see the study from her perspective. This doesn’t mean that we have to agree with all of her conclusions, but it does mean that we must be careful with our own opinions.
