Hollins University

Date: May 26 2005
Major: Language - French/Spanish/etc. (This Major's Salary over time)
OK, this is how it was:

I came to Hollins in the fall of 1982 an angry, sad young woman, who was kicking walls, screaming in the night, and hating the world. The college had a reputation for being a posh school for preppy B students who rode horses and went to W & L a lot. My hair was long, dark and flowing, my clothes were faded blue jeans and cotton T-shirts, and I had been everything from a National Merit Scholar to a concert pianist in high school. I figured this was going to be just another easy, boring school, with more of the same teasing and abuse that I had gotten at my small rural high school.

But something happened on the way to graduation. I discovered Hollins to be one of the most picturesque campuses around, and I used to sit up on the hill back of Tinker Dorm eating Welch's grape pops. Sure, there were idiots at Hollins, just like there probably were at every college, idiots who were always laughing like they got dropped on their heads. But, I found most people at Hollins to be hail fellow, well-met, and accepting. I mellowed out, and sweetened up.

The faculty and most of the staff looked out for me, because I had a medical condition, and I sneaked into the classrooms and found out that I could get a first-class, Ivy League-quality education. Milton Granger (not longer there) was a wonderful piano teacher. I was disappointed with the classes in the German department, because I was interested in Hitler, and wanted to become fluent so that I could become a scholar in that field, but Theresia Reimers and Klaus Phillips were friends, and considering what they had to do with (many lazy students took German because they saw it as an easy A), I'm not surprised the courses weren't more rigorous. Besides, I'm doing my scholar stuff now.

As I wrote above, Hollins had a reputation for being a school for the B student, but that wasn't entirely true. When I applied to graduate achools, I got into Cornell, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received fellowship offers to two of them, and I went to Chapel Hill, because it was nearer to home and it offered more classes and research opportunities in the department of Germanic languages and linguistics.

Hollins taught me a lot in class and out. When I matriculated, I could barely carry on a conversation with someone my age. When I graduated, I could go to a party, well-dressed, my hair cut fashionably, and initiate small talk. The graduate students at Chapel Hill (the nerds) even considered me a party animal!