Journal #4

My Freshman Year: Dec 7, 2009
In chapter 7 and the afterwards part she answers many questions pertaining to her experience. She continues to talk in a negative tone but is starting to realize how different it is between seeing higher education through a student’s point of view rather than a teachers. In chapter 7 she discusses the lessons she learned as a freshman. She tells the reader about her personal experience at AnyU. One thing that surprised us was that she felt a little guilty for lying to her friends she made during her freshman year. In the afterwards part she talks about how she couldn’t expose her identity to her classmates because doing so would ruin the reliability of her research. She was afraid that if her classmates knew she was a professor they would not tell her the entire truth. She is aware that a lot of the information that she received was given to her because she was a student and if the students she talked to knew that she was a professor they would not have answered the way they did.
Something that we found interesting was when she decided to tell Ray that she was a part of the faculty and that she would be willing to write his reference letter for him. This surprised us because we did not expect her to tell anyone her true identity. It was interesting after she told Ray that she started to wonder if she should tell the other students she was taking information from that she was truly a professor. One thing that surprised us is that her first day back as a professor she ran into one of the friends she had made as a student. When asked if she was going to class Nathan told the student that she was teaching it and that she was actually a professor. The student responded by saying that she felt fooled and later Nathan met up with her to explain in detail why she did what she had done. Nathan said that this really moved her and once again made her double guess the fact that she was not telling the other students her true identity. This surprised us because all through the book she stressed how important it was that her true identity was not found out, but now after it is all over she wishes she could go back and tell them the truth.
Now that the book is finished it is easy to see the main audience that Nathan was trying to attract. It is easy to see that the book was written for anyone attending or working at a college campus. She gives both examples throughout the book from both a student and professors point of view, making this book beneficial for both. My Freshman Year gives helpful information for professors to know more on what is going on in their community. It allows professors to know what goes on in a student’s life outside of class and just how much of the information they teach is learned.
Something that we wish Nathan would have addressed in her book is the breaks given to the students throughout the year. We have questions like: Did she stay on Campus? How many breaks did that college give? What did she do on these breaks? It would have been nice to know these questions and interesting to read what happened during this time. Breaks within the school year are important to most students so it would be beneficial if she would have included this information.
This book intersects with The Latehomecomer in many ways. In order to get correct information Nathan had to adapt and become a part of totally different community of that she was living in. A lot like in My Freshman Year, The Latehomecomer was a story of a family coming to live in a new country and how they had to adapt to a new culture. This comparison is interesting because even though these two books seem so different, in many ways they share the same idea of adapting to a new community.