The start of the fall semester at West Virginia University always takes me back to when I arrived on campus exactly 50 years ago.
(Geesh, I cannot believe I just wrote that. Has it really been that long?)
I transferred to WVU after spending one year commuting to Shepherd University (then Shepherd College). Shepherd was great, but I wanted to get out on my own, and also attend a school that offered a broadcast journalism degree.
So I came to Morgantown.
The first few months were very hard. I lived off-campus and only knew a couple fellow students who were from my hometown of Charles Town. It was strange to walk through campus, surrounded by hundreds of people and not knowing anyone!
I was lonely and a little bit scared. It didn’t help that I received a poor mid-semester grade (I think it was a D) in an entry level journalism class. During a depressing phone call with my folks, they said I could always just come home.
That was reassuring, but also a challenge. NO! I was going to stick it out. I felt that if I just gave it a little more time, things would get better. And they did.
I volunteered at the student newspaper, the Daily Athenaeum, and started to make a few friends there. And those friends led to other acquaintances. My social life and my grades improved.
The next year, my junior year, I moved to a house on McLane Avenue where I could walk to class. My roommate was a street-smart city kid from Philadelphia. We became dear friends and still are today. Two close friends from Charles Town transferred to WVU and lived in the apartment above us. We made new friends who lived in the basement apartment.
The higher level classes introduced me to brilliant professors who challenged my previously narrow worldview. I took advantage of the professors’ office hours to pick their brains or, in the case of the respected former CBS foreign correspondent Frank Kearns, listen to his war stories.
Like many college students, I partied … sometimes hard, as did my expanding universe of friends. But I learned from these friends about balance. They kept up their grades and were career-oriented. I don’t recall any of my friends flunking out.
I made a big mistake in my senior year. I skipped graduation (it’s a long story). Over the years, I have covered several WVU graduation ceremonies as a reporter and have always regretted that I did not attend my own.
West Virginia University will always be a special place for me. It was a place where, if you just made the effort, the rewards — both intellectual and social — were immeasurable. I cherish my time at the university.
So, I think about these more than 4,000 new students settling in for their first college experience this week. Some will flunk out. Others will give in to the homesickness. But I suspect most will have similar experiences to mine 50 years ago …
… and find their lives changed for the better.
