Annessa Babic ’98 is a current college professor. Read Part 1 of her advice to freshmen here. _____________________________________________________________________________

When someone makes a late night run to Steak N’ Shake, go. The food might not be the best in the world, or remotely good for you, but those late night conversations will stay with you longer than the calories on the plate. When the World Series occurs, and people start converging in the common areas to root and watch, hang around. You may not like baseball, or either team playing, but in the end you will be richer for a communal moment that is harder to come by in a technology based world. For the record, in 1996 the Yankees played the Braves.  I am a diehard Yankees fan, and I took more grief than I care to remember for yelling for the pinstripes. Memories of watching those games, amongst my roommates, football players, random people from class, and those I still call friends still bring excitement and joy to me.

Use these same acquaintances along the way to battle the hard classes and laugh at the great ones. Embrace study groups, but don’t pester professors for review days. More often than not, those don’t happen. Instead, rely on yourself and your cadre of friends to amass the understanding needed for the task at hand. I firmly believe ninety percent of the college experience teaches you to make decisions on your own, stand your own ground and learn how to maneuver this thing we call life.

Notice, I did not say ace the exam. Why? Much like life, academic scores come from understanding. If you understand the material, you will show that in your answers. If you try to dryly memorize the data your answers will show a lack of understanding with jumbled and convoluted phrases sloppily laid on your page. This sense of understanding should carry you through your days. Do not worry if you don’t have a major in your first year. Do not worry if you still don’t have one in your second year. If you reach your junior year and still have no direction, then you should certainly seek some guidance. Why shouldn’t you worry? Those pesky classes called the deck requirements aren’t put there to drum you into submission. They give you a sampling of skills, subjects, and tasks. They should help you find what your true passion is. I have to say, if your true passion is history, don’t worry about how much money you won’t make. Instead, relish in the fact of how you will do something you love and love what you do.  

I see that this year the freshman class logo is “Your future is so bright you gotta wear shades.” What was mine? I transferred to KWC in 1996, and I think we were “Foundations.” Honestly, I cannot remember. What I do recall is that within a matter of weeks – like many college coeds – my wardrobe became a poster board for KWC. My friends were a hop and skip away.  Watching the football team lose wasn’t so bad because we knew them and knew they had heart. The basketball team brought up bragging rights for that blue and white school on the other side of the state. And . . . dubbing my favorite professor Captain History, later to be named “The Grinch who Stole My GPA,” and when he turned thirty, we painted Minerva in his honor.

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Annessa Ann Babic ’98 majored in English and History at KWC. She earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stony Brook University in 2008 and currently teaches at New York Institute of Technology and SUNY College at Old Westbury. She is the co-editor of The Globetrotting Shopaholic (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), has written scores of academic pieces and uses a pen name to write fiction. She lives in Astoria (Queens), NY.

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It’s that time of year again, when young and old all across the land head back to school.  Back in the day, I stood in line as a new kid to get my polyester gym shorts and white tee. You could smell the fear in the room. Ugh, gym class and middle school. Neither were good combinations, particularly those polyester shorts. Ugh, gym shorts.

The power of literary technique allows me to jump forward seven or so years to my days at Kentucky Wesleyan. Those first days for new freshmen are always filled with wonder and awe, and in many cases a lot of angst arises. Unfortunately, this angst does not necessarily dissipate with the swing of the new semester. More often than not, though, this angst can pass rather seamlessly like the turns of the seasons. These are the things I often try to convey to my own timid freshman, or drifting and worried upperclassmen.

I graduated college in 1998, and yes we had the internet. My college days were shortly before the birth of Google, long before the advent of internet blackmail known as YouTube, at the beginning of cell phones becoming commonplace, right before the installation of key cards versus keys, when the computer lab was the only place to do your work, and at the end of the era when cable was not in dorm rooms. We gathered in common rooms to watch South Park and yell at ESPN games. In the midst of this, course work fell and campus legends loomed.

First, professors do not sharpen their pencils with their teeth or grade your papers with their blood. Trust me. We do not idle away at our desks and computers looking for ways to make your life miserable, and when we say come speak to us you should. Course syllabi are like maps for the semester, and like any good road trip, things may change. So when a professor adds a reading, or changes a due date, he or she is doing it because the nature of the group calls for it. Believe it or not, we have lives. We like ball games, we like dinner with friends, and we like to do things non-academic. Hence, when something is due turn it in. When you have trouble, don’t wait until the last minute to get help. Emailing a professor at 1:00 a.m. the night before the final will not help your grade.

On that same note, but slightly different, college is about more than the books. My fondest memories of KWC involve strolling through the quad and sharing a soda with those I met along the way. There used to be an infant tree outside what is now the Old Grill. In 2000 a tornado came and took it down, and to this day I am still saddened. Why? I read Jack Kerouac under that tree, studied for my favorite class, and Melanie Basham, Sonya Martin and I planned how we would change the world.

My point: remember in the hustle and bustle to stop and talk to those around you. Those first few days you won’t know many or even anyone. Within a week you will certainly know at least twenty-five, and the beauty and joy of KWC is that it is a small campus. There is always a friend around a corner. Though too, the pain of KWC is that it is small. If you do something outlandishly stupid you will be reminded four years later after you walk across the stage. More so, remember to have fun.

Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon …

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Check out this interview of KWC basketball signee Jason Hall on ESPN’s First Take. Jason earned a scholarship even though he has born with only three fingers on each hand:

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 Laura Leach ‘95 is working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. She will be sending regular updates to KWConnect about her experiences in Africa. Click here to read her story from the beginning.

(Tororo is on the right, just above the box.)

One of the toughest emotional challenges during Peace Corps is losing members of your training class. After that first weekend with our host families, a married couple that we came over with decided to go back to the United States. They had dreamed of being in the Peace Corps back in the early years of the Peace Corps, but they had been discouraged by their parents. All of their kids are now grown, and they had recently retired, and decided to pursue their dream. The wife was an education volunteer, and the husband was an economic development volunteer, and both brought with them a wealth of knowledge and experience.

After that first weekend, they decided they had made a mistake and could not spend two years away from their children and grandchildren. With a bat of an eye, they were gone and there was nothing for the rest of us to do but move forward.

Snacks and Weddings
Things were looking pretty sunny for me at my home stay. I had chosen carrots and cucumbers for my first night snack, and this turned out to be a good move. Ugandans are very warm and welcoming people. They go out of their way for their guests, and as soon as Jane found out I enjoyed carrots and cucumbers, they become a regular part of my diet throughout my stay.

My first weekend at home stay, Jane had a wedding reception she was catering, and I got to tag along. I can’t imagine crashing a wedding reception in the United States and the wedding party being okay with that, but there I was at a wedding reception where I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me, and I was greeted and told that I was “most welcomed.”

I was the only white person there, which means I got a lot of attention, especially from the children. This wedding was a western style wedding being held in Kampala. The main difference between an American wedding reception and this one was that there were many more speeches given at the Ugandan reception, and then the cake was served to the guests by the bridesmaids and groomsmen. I thought that was a nice touch.

Heading East
Pre-service training is all leading to you getting your own site where you will live and work. Although we had to wait until our last week of training to find out the exact community where we would be located, we got a big hint when we were divided into our language groups. I was put in the dhopadhola  group with Mary Beth, Greg and Racheal. Only one district in Uganda speaks dhopadhola, and that is Tororo. I would be heading east.

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 Laura Leach ‘95 is working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda. She will be sending regular updates to KWConnect about her experiences in Africa. Click here to read her story from the beginning.

Do you like children? Yes. Do you require a lot of privacy? Yes. I was filling out my home stay questionnaire. During our pre-service training, each volunteer is placed with a home stay family. The idea is for us to interact with Ugandans, learn about the culture, and also learn how to do things the local way – like wash clothes in a basin and cook using a sigiri (small charcoal stove).

I’m sure there is also an emotional element there, too … we hopefully would bond with our Ugandan family, so we wouldn’t bolt and return to the US because we missed the families we left behind. The host families also filled out questionnaires, and the night before we left for Wakiso, Irene (the cultural trainer) was matching volunteers with host families.

The Mom

Laura and her home stay "mom," Jane.

When the big day came, we were all given an index card with the name of our host parents, which parish they lived in, what religion they practiced, and how many children they have. My card said Jane, two children, Catholic, and I won’t even try to remember how to spell the parish now. It turns out the card was a little misleading. Jane is Catholic, but she is virtually a non-attending Catholic much as I am virtually a non-attending Christian. She does have a son and daughter, but the daughter was away at college and the son was away at boarding school. Jane is a school teacher in Mengo, which is a suburb of Kampala. She also has a side business as a caterer. In short, Jane is a very busy woman.

Jane is a widow, but she has a houseboy named Joseph who was responsible for cooking, cleaning, collecting water from the well, opening up the house in the morning and closing it up at night, doing the laundry and running errands. I later learned that Joseph was Jane’s nephew and that it is not uncommon for families to have a relative working as a house boy or girl. Joseph didn’t speak much English at all, and I didn’t speak much Luganda, so we had an interesting relationship that consisted of a lot of laughing, smiling, and pointing.

On the big day when we met our families, all of the volunteers were seated in the dining area at ROCCO, a guest house that had been hired out to serve as our training site. The host families didn’t all arrive at once – they sort of trickled in. I sat and watched the hugging and hellos, and waited for my turn. Those of us whose “parents” had not arrived yet looked like the animals left at the end of a pet adoption day at the local pet store. You could sort of sense the rising desperation that we wouldn’t be picked. Certainly it wouldn’t be unheard of for someone to change his or her mind about having a complete stranger stay in his or her home for 10 weeks.

Eventually my “mom” did arrive, and we sat down and talked a bit with my friend Mary Beth, a volunteer from Missouri whose home stay Mom was friends with Jane. Slowly, host families and volunteers started going their separate ways.

The House

Jane's house, where Laura stayed for 10 weeks.

Jane’s home was beautiful. It was a four-bedroom house with a garage. She had electricity, but no running water. The latrine was outside, but the bathing room was right next to my bedroom, and there was a door that opened from my bedroom into the bathing room, so no streaking through the house in a towel. Yes!!!

There was also a refrigerator, which I didn’t appreciate the significance of at the time, but certainly do now after going a year without having one. After we got all of my things moved into my bedroom, Jane asked me what I wanted to eat. I didn’t know at the time, but how I answered this one question would impact my future happiness for the next 10 weeks.

Stay tuned …

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