Project Themes

At OHP, we view this oral history project and the intergenerational conversation we hope it will facilitate as a kind of campus resource.  It’s a different kind of campus resource than supports like the Counseling & Testing Center, the Campus Food Pantry, the Office of Student Life, or Resident Assistants (RAs) and definitely not meant to replace the expertise those other kinds of resources have.  But we believe that the oral history process – making primary source recordings of what people remember and think is important about their college experiences, and sharing those recordings with people who could benefit from the information they contain – can play a role in making UWL students more resourceful people who are better equipped to be successful at college studentness.  

Our “College Life” project is influenced by a concept known as an “ethic of care,” which asks people to consider how their decisions and actions can support people they regularly interact with and help them grow.  Scholars who write about care ethics often use educational settings – where teachers, advisors, and staff help students, where teachers and students collaborate, where students assist each others’ learning – as an example of where this kind of support work happens.*  

Hearing how much our alumni interviewees in the “College Life” project wanted their oral histories to help current students by sharing their stories convinced us to include the “ethics of care” concept when explaining Theme #1.  And our research in the campus archives further reinforced this sense of an extended campus community as a space where people look out for each other.  One of our favorite primary sources so far is a 1959 typewritten “How to Study” handout created by the Campus Vets Club.**  While its unknown author wasn’t the greatest typist, their intention – encouraging other students by sharing what they’d figured out about study skills – comes across clearly.

* See Nell Noddings, Philosophy of Education, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 231-245.

** UWL Campus Vets Club, “How to Study,” in vertical file New Student Orientation (NSO) Program-1959, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Murphy Library Special Collections/Area Research Center, La Crosse, Wisconsin. 

College studentness is a trial-and-error process that asks you to navigate new living, working, and emotional conditions you may not have much prior experience with.  These  “firsts” can include everything from the first time you live with a roommate, do your own laundry, set a budget and do your own taxes, advocate for yourself at a doctor’s appointment, to the first time you fail a quiz or test and decide to go to the Murphy Learning Center for tutoring.  Remembering there’s a learning curve to college studentness can help you be patient with yourself and keep challenges in perspective.  There’s work, practice – and even some experimentation – that all college students go through along the way.

Because college studentness tends to involve about four to five years of your life, you will likely be a different person when you leave UWL.  There are two really important things to keep in mind about the time dimension of college life.  First, it may take some time – a semester, a few semesters – before you settle in and accomplish things that people sometimes assume will happen instantly: finding friends may take some time, settling on a major and minor that are the best fit for you may take some time, establishing effective studying, note-taking, and writing skills may take some time.  

Second, the passage of time will help you think differently about your experiences in college.  As a second-semester student you’ll have a different perspective on all of the “firsts” you navigated during your initial semester.  As a sophomore you’ll be able to apply what you learned through the trial-and-error experimentation of your first year.  As an alumni your feelings about your college years may shift as you move into a “looking back on it…” perspective.

College studentness is a shared experience that has common rituals, rites of passage, triumphs, and challenges which connect people together and help them identify as part of a community.  The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 16,200,000 people will be college students (undergraduates) during 2024.  9,379 of those students are here at UWL right now, with 2,325 of them being first-years students.  

And yet, there is only 1 you – a unique individual navigating something that other people are also going through (college studentness), but doing it in your own way.  As you go about your daily life as a college student, each new challenge reveals abilities you might not have been previously aware you had.  You’ll grow in ways that can help clarify who you are and who you want to become.  Going through the process of college studentness helps you get to know yourself in a more authentic way.

UWL’s Alumni Association estimates that at least 89,978 people have been college students here during our university’s 115-year long history (1909-2024).  Across these multiple generations of college student experiences, there is evidence of both of the “over time” relationships that historians study: change and continuity.  For example, first-year students in 1909 had one specific note-taking technology – writing on paper – available to keep up with lecture and lab content, while students in 2024 can sometimes type notes on laptops or write on electronic tablets.  This change in note-taking technology might make students from different time periods think they don’t have much in common?  But the evidence we’ve collected through the “College Life” oral histories suggest major continuities across what generations of UWL students remember about their experiences.  For example, students from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s all remember the sometimes intense learning curve associated with developing note-taking strategies in fast-paced lecture courses, feeling varying degrees of “impostor syndrome” in tough courses, and needing reassurance from family and peers that they would survive their first college courses.  So a topic that might initially seem like a clear-cut example of change – how students cope with the deluge of information coming at them in a college course – also provides some examples of continuities caused by the underlying conditions associated with college studentness that are ongoing across multiple decades.

In the “College Life” oral histories we’ve repeatedly encountered this phenomenon of both change and continuity in experiences of college studentness.  Examples include: reactions to communal living conditions (dorms and dining halls), figuring out how to pay for college, building relationships with professors, navigating course registration each semester, and determining future career plans.

In many cases, starting college means leaving your home community and migrating to a new location.  One measure of how college campuses bring together people from different backgrounds is the range of places students are from.  According to UWL’s Admissions Office, in 2024 we have students on campus from 36 different states and 30 different countries.  To that mix of people who have traveled long distances to attend college here, UWL also adds a large number of students from the nearby counties on both sides of the Mississippi.  For example, our current collection of interviewees in the “College Life” project includes former college students from as close as Trempelau, WI and Rochester, MN and as far away as Milwaukee.  Beyond hometown, all students bring with them other factors that mean they have a different background than people they will be sharing classrooms, dining halls, and dorm rooms with.  Examples include: ancestry, financial situation, region (city, suburb, rural), gender orientation and identity, learning styles, culture, religion, how many generations of college students a person’s family does or doesn’t yet have.  All of the above is also true for each faculty member and staff member who is part of the UWL community.  

Although we can sometimes feel like it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge diversity across the backgrounds and backstories of people we interact with on a college campus, in reality this diversity is a really typical aspect of college life.  In our “College Life” oral history project we’ve identified four specific, and intersecting, reasons why this is the case:

1. Moving away from home to become a college student (or to start a job as a faculty or staff member) means adjusting to different combinations of people, attitudes, values, and behaviors and figuring out what to do next.
2. The communal living and learning conditions of college brings people (students, faculty, staff) with different backgrounds and backstories into close and sustained contact with each other.
3. College studentness is an era in a person's lifetime that leads people to reflect on, and possibly think differently about, their own identity.
4. Because college campuses are places where people work together to help each other succeed (Theme #1), we often discover how situations that seem normal to us might feel, look, or come across differently to people from backgrounds and backstories that differ from ours.