By: Kelsey Aylor, Staff Writer
Whether you’re new to campus or returning for another year, starting classes and readjusting into college life can be a nerve-wracking experience. Maybe you’re scared that the person you chose to room with is secretly a professional yodeler and will keep you up all night with their practice. Or maybe you feel completely incompetent as an English
major in a 3hour biology lab where half your class has seemingly completed individual research projects. Or maybe you’re worried that during the exhausting trek up the stairs of Old Main you’ll trip and drop your books and
papers everywhere.
But fear not! Not only have your peers experienced these unfortunate, embarrassing and awkward situations but so have a fair share of your professors. From humiliating parental encounters to roommate nightmares, Wofford’s faculty have years of experience in regards to surviving college life. Dr. George Singleton, John C. Cobb professor of humanities, and Dr.Tracy Revels, history professor, experienced similar situations and hoped to impart words of wisdom on how to handle them.
“I think I must’ve gotten into college due to a geographical need by the Admissions Department,” says Singleton. “I know this: I showed up in college not knowing if the word ‘didn’t’ was spelled thusly, or as ‘did’nt,’ because I had an English teacher in high school who told me, ‘It don’t matter.’ Maybe she said, ‘It do’nt matter,’ now that I think about it.”
Singleton lived in a hall for first-year students with variously affluent people, including students whose fathers were foreign ambassadors, the head of the IRS, the top-selling Rolls Royce dealer east of the Mississippi River, a brain surgeon and a top tax attorney. According to Singleton, these boys went to prep schools and vacationed yearly in Europe.
“One day in an art history class, this kid from my hall told the professor, ‘Your slide is in backwards — I’ve seen that portrait at the Tate Museum in London.’ I’d never been to an art museum at this point,” says Singleton. “I realized that I had my work cut out for me. I started living in the library pretty much. Part of this had to do with the library being the only safe spot from people thinking it necessary to offer their testimonials inexorably– this was a Baptist college. Don’t ask what I was doing at a Baptist college. But somewhere along the line, I decided that I wouldn’t be shown up in class by these rich kids. I studied and read more than I needed and started thinking about how I wanted to be a writer.”
His advice: “Be hard-headed and persistent.”
“I’m an only child, so one of the most difficult adjustments I faced in college was having roommates,” Revels says. “One roommate was called ‘Munchkin’– yes, she was short and no, I didn’t name her that– and she was the most annoying girl on the planet. She believed that it was unhealthy for anyone to go to sleep before midnight. We roomed together during a summer semester when I was taking an overload of classes. I’d be exhausted every evening, but the moment I would drift off to sleep she would scream at me to wake me up because it wasn’t midnight yet.
“I also had a roommate named Angela who thought she was Madonna – the 1980s pop singer, not the Holy Virgin,” Revels says. “We had a phone in our room and a whiteboard next to it with a list of all her guys and what I was supposed to tell each one if he called when she was out: ‘Jimmy – she’ll call you back. Ted – she’ll see you at the club. Max – she’s out of town, but I’ll take a message. Ed – she died.’
Her advice: “Just remember, when you think you and your roommate are mismatched, Dr.Revels –the most boring person who ever went to college– had to live with the 1980s version of Miley Cyrus.”
