Monday, February 22, 2016

Memory Monday


     Illinois College, Jacksonvile, Illinois....a lovely little private Liberal Arts college. Had I attended IC straight out of high school, I would probably had loved it. It was quite small by college standards, I'm guessing no more than six-seven hundred students. I looked up the current population and there are around 1,000 students there now. But I had spent the last two years at the BIG UNIVERSITY! So IC seemed like just a glorified high school. 
     I was an angry, obnoxious snob!!! I had to attend new student orientation and a counseling session with the Dean of Women. I discovered that because my grades at Mizzou were sooo bad, my allowed transfer grades were only enough credits to list me as a second semester FRESHMAN! Oh, the indignation of it all! And to top it off, Freshmen were required to wear a beanie! My first opportunity for rebellion!!! I absolutely refused to wear the silly thing...after all, in my heart, I was a Junior, for crying out loud! So another visit to the Dean of women! She was a very nice lady actually, and I wasn't such a rebel that I was rude or disrespectful to her. My parents did bring me up right, after all. And she did allow that I could be exempt as even real Freshmen did not wear them second semester!
      Because I had registered late, I was assigned to off campus housing for over flow attendance. Right on the edge of campus was a beautiful antebellum style old house that had been willed to the College many years previously and converted into a girls' dormitory.
          My room was second floor, to the left of the balcony on the far end. I shared the room with three other girls and another smaller room was behind it and connected by a door for two more girls. We all became really good friends as several of us were transfer students, kind of there for the same reason! There were several Freshmen scattered out among us too, probably about thirty of us all together.     
       Small Liberal  Arts colleges like IC were known for accepting students that perhaps had academic concerns! IC has a highly rated academic program; the majority of the students were from the Chicago area or the East coast. I'm sure the open enrollment was a financial thing...most small colleges struggle for monetary resources!

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