College Life
A page within Oral History Program
Image on top left courtesy of Gavin Stebbins and Wayne Barrett. Other images courtesy of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections and UWL Murphy Library Special Collections. To learn more about any of the images, contact OHP at: oralhistory@uwlax.edu.
Announcing the "College Life: What We Remember" Project
OHP is very excited to unveil the pilot phase of our new oral history project, which launched in April 2023. “College Life: What We Remember” asks UWL alumni to share recollections about their experiences as college students—their learning and living conditions, their social and academic lives, how they think they changed from first-years to seniors—during the specific timeframe they attended UWL. Our initial 13 interviews shed light on student life at UWL between 1973-2022.
The “College Life” project represents three core aspects of OHP’s mission: preserving oral histories, finding creative ways to bring them to new audiences, and involving UWL students throughout the planning, interviewing, and collection processing stages of oral history projects. The idea for the “College Life” oral histories began when OHP Director Tiffany Trimmer taught two sections of FYS 100 (First Year Seminar) in Spring 2022. It became apparent that integrating the stories of prior generations of college students could help current first-years put their own experiences into perspective. So, as their final project, Dr. Trimmer’s Spring 2022 FYS 100 students proposed interview topics and questions they thought current first-years would want to hear about. Then, in Spring 2023 Dr. Trimmer taught HIS 300: Oral History Interviewing & Interpretation. In that semester she and the HIS 300 students designed the “College Life” oral history project and conducted the first 13 interviews. These interviews will form part of the curriculum for Dr. Trimmer’s Fall 2023 sections of FYS 100, and those students will help shape the next phases of the “College Life" project.
OHP thanks all the UWL students who have shaped the “College Life” project so far: Spring 2022 FYS 100 students, Spring 2023 HIS 300 students, and OHP’s amazing interns: Shaylin Crack, Julia Milne, Michael Presslak, Olivia Steil, Kellen Szumski, Olivia Templeton, Megan Watt, and Isaac Wegner.
