Chapter 1 Summarizer Liz Diede

 The opening chapter of Rebekah Nathan’s book “My Freshman Year,” explains the purposes of her study on the culture of undergraduate students in college. Nathan, a cultural anthropologist and professor, describes the differences she sees in students today from the community of people that she went to college with twenty years previously. She cannot understand why students do not take advantage of her office hours when they are struggling, and cannot make sense of behaviors of students such as eating and sleeping during her lectures. Nathan explains to the reader that she will gather information on this culture through participant-observer research. She applied to the university that she taught at, and began her studies from a single room in a resident hall on campus. Nathan is careful to avoid misrepresenting herself while still not giving her position as a researcher away. She explains the hardships she goes through while attempting to fit in as a ‘native’ in this culture of college aged students.

Nathan’s tone in this chapter is very informational. She describes the techniques she will use in going about her research, while including some examples of her first few encounters with incoming freshmen during welcome week on campus. Rules and regulations of the university are laid out in this chapter, and the reader is informed of Nathan’s circumstances as a new student on campus. One situation explained by Nathan from this chapter that is particularly memorable is one between Nathan and her resident assistant who caught Nathan drinking a beer in the lounge of her dorm. This encounter surprised me because I assumed that since Nathan has been a professor at this university for fifteen years, she would know the rules about drinking in the resident halls.