| Maybe this rundown of my college years won't interest anybody but me, but here it is, anyway. If you get through it and want details, click above. And I�m going to warn you from the beginning that, for a journalist, my grammar isn�t go great. Saying things the right way can sound so stuffy, though, and I�m purposely choosing to be less formal here. So, don�t give me a hard time about it. People say that high school makes up "the best years of your life." I didn't find that to be true at all. In high school I was scrawny, shy, wore hand-me-down clothes and was made fun of in the middle of the cafeteria. When I got to Ohio State (1976), five other girls from my high school graduating class lived on the same dorm floor and would barely give me the time of day. At least two of them I had known since kindergarten. My freshman year I lived in Siebert Hall, on South Campus. It was an all-girls dorm that year. My roommate, Nancy McLean, and I were very different people and never really mixed. We never fought or anything, we just didn�t bond. She was from Canton, Ohio, one of the few female engineering majors and proud of it. She was much more outgoing, and seemed fearless to me, and I guess I was intimidated by her. Whereas Nancy appeared confident from the get-go, to me college was a bit of a shock at first and it took me a while to get comfy with it. I had signed up to be a substitute in the cafeteria, not wanting to work full-time until I felt more at home, but within a few days I got called in to work for a girl who had quit, and they offered me her position permanently. It didn�t take long to see why she had quit - it was a rather demeaning job and the "regular" employee she worked with was a bit odd, to say the least. In the end, it was the best thing I could have done. There were lots of student employees who I quickly made friends with, and we had a blast. They came from four or five different dorms, and over time I met some of their roommates and buddies, increasing my pool of friends. Between them, girls from my dorm, people I met in class, and kids from my high school, I soon knew quite a large group. In no time at all I felt like a different person. High school? What was that? I had no recollection of it. I had no life before OSU. I was just born there, and life was good. Of course, what is OSU without football? I had season tickets but got stuck in the South Stands - the crummy endzone seats. Not that I cared terribly; it was great just to be at a Buckeye football game. Being part of a sellout crowd of 93,000 every game was an incredible feeling. It was also cool to cheer for the players from my high school who were on the team - Kelton Dansler and Ty Hicks are all I can think of offhand. Ty used to make 95-yard kickoff returns for touchdowns! I hated leaving school at the end of the year, but went home and worked and waited for September when I could go back again. I lived in Siebert Hall again, though the situation wasn't quite the same. Siebert had been an all-girls dorm but went co-ed that year. The dorm that faced ours, across the parking lot, had been all-guys, and no one took the news well when it was announced that Stradley would become all-girls and Siebert go co-ed. Some of the guys had a procession through the cafeteria with a make-shift coffin. The story was that Stradley would end up destroyed if it remained all guys, and I could believe it, from some of the things that happened there. My sophomore year was even better than freshman. My sister Charlotte started at OSU and we were roommates. She got a job in the cafeteria too, so we had a lot of experiences in common. Then a co-worker gave us free tickets one night to a hockey game and we were hooked! And to think we hadn't even known until then that OSU had a hockey team! Our tiny rink was scorned by other teams, but it made for a cozy atmosphere where you got to know your neighbor. I got more into my journalism classes, having my first articles printed in the student paper. Talk about thrills! Having to interview total strangers scared me to death at first, until I realized that people were usually pretty eager to tell their stories and wanted to talk to me. I think it really made me a much more confident and outgoing person in time. TO BE CONTINUED....... |
| Life at OSU |
| UNDER CONSTRUCTION! |