I knew something was very wrong toward the end of Freshman year at Wesleyan. I’d begun to withdraw from the circle of friends I’d become so close to over the year that two of them came home with me over Spring Break. I either couldn’t fall asleep at all or slept 12 or more hours a day. I perseverated over every little thing and yet felt like a zombie. I kept my grades up, mainly because it felt like the only thing keeping me going. I wasn’t “me” anymore. It was my first brush with a major depressive episode, one that would last another year and a half and nearly kill me. By late Fall of sophomore year, when I had to meet with my advisor about my schedule for Spring term, I didn’t really feel like I’d make it to Spring term. I broke down in front of this highly respected history professor and told him I didn’t think I could stay at Wesleyan. I don’t remember exactly what he said to me, but I came out of that meeting feeling like someone cared about me and believed I could make it. He got me set up with campus mental health for counseling and checked back in with me a few times.\u00a0His small kindness felt so very big to me at the time (and even now).<\/p>\n
In addition to depression, I had a mean case of impostor syndrome, which was exacerbated by being at such a rigorous university. While I’d gone to a mediocre Florida public school, most of my friends went to the best private schools in the country where they’d studied\u00a0things like Foucault in Freshman year. Some of my friends’ parents were nobel prize winners or famous playwrights, filmmakers, and authors. I felt constantly out of my depth; I didn’t know how I’d even gotten accepted.<\/p>\n
But I was also so excited by what I was learning. I came to college wanting to better understand philosophy, history, and human behavior and I took so many courses that illuminated for me the human mind. I ended up writing a thesis that combined the three, a look at how the philosophical movement in Prussia from enlightenment thinking to romanticism (and the nationalism that came with it) led a tremendous number of the Jews of Berlin to convert to Christianity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But\u00a0I almost didn’t do an honors thesis at all, had I not been\u00a0convinced to do it by the professor who would become my thesis advisor, Oliver Holmes. He persuaded\u00a0me that I could do it and that my crackpot theories around this topic were not actually so crazy. He even went to the powers that be to get me registered as a thesis student since it was after drop\/add. He kicked my butt all year, made me read insane amounts of content, and made me a better writer than I’d ever been before. And had he not encouraged me, I would have missed out on one of the best intellectual experiences of my life.<\/p>\n
Had I thought that either of these professors might have tweeted or shared information\u00a0about me (even anonymously) on some other social media platform, I would never have approached them in the first place. I approached these two professors because I trusted them. I find the idea of my professors complaining about me mortifying. But that’s the world we seem to live in these days; a world where instructors take to social media to blow off steam about their students for infractions big and small or to share the funny things they say or requests they make. I call it “Dear Student” culture, for the truly awful blog\u00a0that was a part of the Chronicle of Higher Ed<\/a> for a while.<\/p>\n Jesse Stommel wrote a terrific piece about the “Dear Student” column<\/a> and how it compelled him to quit writing for the Chronicle himself. I really appreciated these bullet points and his views on venting about students in public:<\/p>\n What everyone working anywhere even near to the education system needs to do:<\/p>\n I certainly understand the need to vent. My professional colleagues and I vent to each other privately in areas in which we could not be overheard by students. Twitter is not\u00a0such a place.<\/p>\n The other day, I saw a professor write about a student who had asked for the syllabus for a Fall course in July. <\/p>\n "Hi Professor. I know it's only July, but do you have the syllabus ready that we'll use in the fall? I want to.." pic.twitter.com\/thHNCI5EC8<\/a><\/p>\n — Charles W. McKinney (@kmt188) July 6, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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