Rent My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Synopsis

Rebekah Nathan’ is the pseudonym invented by a college professor who decided to take a year off from teaching and find out what things were truly like from the other side and how things have changed since her own college days a generation ago. She enrolled as a freshman at her school, lived in a dorm, and took on a full load of courses. The professor is an anthropologist, and her observation and research skills came in handy as she saw firsthand how tough it is to negotiate the coursework, do the readings, schedule classes, see professors, and have a life. Through interviews conducted during her second semester, she got a sobering glimpse of where academics fit into the students’ priorities. Students today, she found, are career-oriented and apply a cost-benefits approach to their assignments--which means that they decide what readings they will complete based on how much they think that reading will benefit them. Though Professor Nathan found that the current generation is significantly different from her own, she also found that they still like to learn. As a result of her experiment, she has adapted her coursework, including paring down reading assignments to only those that are essential. MY FRESHMAN YEAR should interest and benefit teachers, students, and parents. (Shortly after MY FRESHMAN YEAR was published, ’Rebekah Nathan’ was revealed to be professor Cathy Small, of Northern Arizona University.)

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