My Freshman Year...a Reflection

Reflective Reading Log #2

Written: 2/14/09

In My Freshman Year, Nathan (2005) curiously situates herself as a college freshman.  It is another village experience for a seasoned anthropologist who has spent considerable time overseas, studying cultures vastly different from her own.  In her description of this experience, she gives valuable insight to: 1) the practice of anthropology, 2) methodological intricacies and difficulties, and 3) the American college.  As a middle aged female, she begins with what she calls a “delicate balancing act between truth and fiction” (p. 6).  This is a key question for the anthropologist, but comes to fore when the research site is actually your home. 

            The research is sound and the writing is clever.  It seems whimsical to enter college life as a freshman, but Nathan provides insightful comparisons to her own overseas experiences and even those of renowned researchers like Clifford Geertz.  She describes entry into the setting through getting in trouble, playing sports, and living in the dorms.  In the midst of intriguing descriptions, she offers sound methodological realities and philosophical foundations for this kind of research:

One can never really “go native” or expect that one’s own experience is indicative of the experience of others born in the culture.  At the same time, it is the experience of living village life that offers insight and vantage point needed to ask relevant questions and understand the context of the answers given.

While Nathan include national statistics for purposes of comparison, she reveals the brilliance and depth of anthropological research that cannot be captured through quantitative survey data.  Although ethnographic methods are often thought to be less generalizable, this study intimately connects with the American college phenomena and provides insight into the experience.

            Ranging from mapping physical spaces, to noting advertisements like “get involved” and rape and sexual assault methods, Nathan adequately paints a picture of the messages being communicated and then how they are received by the students.  She is able to uncover “underlying values” expressed by the students through dorm decorations, common images, and language use. 

            In terms of insight, Nathan pinpoints that the real experience of college life, “was in the variation—in the sense that it was also considered normal to stay up past 2 AM or to awaken after noon” (p. 35).  Her description for the university is “overoptioned” and her focus on community in Chapter 3 reveals the paradoxical desire and resistance to community and the value of individualism, spontaneity, and choice.  Noting that some university events geared at community fail and that many dorm lounges are empty, Nathan unveils that community, for many students, means a network of close personal friends—an ego-centric social group of students with intense reciprocity.  Individualism, community, networks, and reciprocity are difficult to define, understand, and research.  However, five months in a university cafeteria monitoring that pattern of traffic and eating groups has produced research valuable to students, faculty, administrators and other researchers.