Rebekah Nathans Methods

Is it even accurate?

My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned By Becoming A Student

Rebekah Nathan is writer and a researcher, as well as a college professor. She wanted to research college life in order to hopefully explain the behavior that she and her colleges have witnessed in class. So she decided to attend an anonymous university as an undeclared undergraduate student. Nathan struggled with how to represent herself in order to get the same results as if she were a student. In her book she says:

“My friends and colleagues helped me wrestle with my problem of identity, asking ‘What will you says if someone asks you what you do for a living?’ ‘Can’t I say I’m not working now—that I’m a student?’ I responded… ‘Yes’ a colleague agreed ,‘but what if they ask what you did before?’ ‘I’ll tell them I've done many things—which I have. I can say I’m a writer among other things, because I still get royalties from my last book’”(6)

Though Nathan has established a fairly accurate identity without giving away that she is a college professor and potentially destroying the results, it is still impossible for her to be able to get accurate results.

Accuracy is Impossible to Achieve

Though Nathan has a fairly sound identity, she is still not a student. She is much older than all of the other students on her floor, which she describes as “consisting of mostly nineteen-and twenty-year-olds” (5). This large age gap makes the information shared with Nathan as well as the interactions between Nathan and the other students on her floor not the same at two 19 year 0lds interacting or sharing information. Nathan also opts to have a single room on her floor. This also makes it much harder to collect information that is truly accurate. She does not have roommates who are truly in the Discourse of being a college freshman and because of that she is not truly exposed to that Discourse. Though she may be partially exposed to the Discourse there is no way that she can accurately collect data without being fully exposed to the proper form of the Discourse.

Nathan is more experienced

Nathan is attempting to collect data as a student, which is again impossible. Since she has also been a college professor it is impossible for her to experience college as merely a student. Of course it is possible to be a professor and attend college as a student. However Nathan is attempting to collect data from the view point of the nineteen and twenty year old perspective which of course she cannot achieve. First of all because she has experienced much more than a nineteen or twenty year old and I’m sure that she does not hold the same views on college as well as life in general. Second because she has experienced what it is like to be a college professor. Nathan can of course attempt to acquire the information from other nineteen and twenty year old students however there is absolutely no guarantee that the information that is being fed to Nathan is accurate or correct.

Give her at least a little credit

Though there are a significant amount of flaws in the way that Nathan has attempted to collect data and write a book about it, there is still an amount of accuracy to her book. She was still attending college, acting as a freshman which counts for something. So in the end Nathans book should simply be taken with a grain of salt.

Works cited

Nathan, Rebekah [Cathy Small]. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Cornell University Press, 2005. Print.