The first day of class at Fort Lewis College was a brave new world for 19-year-old freshman Taylor Moore from Oklahoma.
“It’s so different from Oklahoma,” Moore said on Monday. “There’s mountains everywhere; there’s so many activities I have never heard of or done before. We don’t have skiing or hiking because we don’t have mountains. It’s all flat.
“We hunt and we fish in Oklahoma, and that’s all we do. I don’t know how to snowboard or anything. They have bicycle trails everywhere. We ride horses around, not bicycles.”
Issac Nemcek, 26, was having the opposite experience. Having already lived away from home – he spent the last year living in a tent on a beach in Big Sur, Calif., as part of a yurt community – Nemcek was having to adjust back to structured lifestyle of classes and homework.
Originally from the Front Range and a former student of Naropa University in Boulder, he is returning to higher education to study community development.
“It will be a little interesting to be a 26-year-old among everyone else. I am happy to be engaged in academics again,” Nemcek said. “I do miss the ocean.”
Monday was a time of readjustment. To walk around campus was to hear questions such as “How many meals are there in the 10-meal plan?”
To ease the transition, Dawn Mulhern, an associate professor of anthropology, decided a minute into a class to take her students outside where they sat in a circle on the grass and discussed the research methods of anthropology.
On her first day, Mulhern was happy to discover that new campus policies are proving effective.
“This morning, I taught a class of 48,” Mulhern said. “Everybody was there. We have a new policy. Professors can drop you after the first day if you’re not there. So apparently it’s working.”
The perfect attendance was more impressive when considering that Monday was the Labor Day holiday.
“It’s true,” said Mitch Davis, the public affairs officer of Fort Lewis in an email. “We do not take many of the traditional vacation days during the school year (Labor Day, Columbus Day, etc.)
“This has been the policy of the college for years now, and people have grown accustomed to it. It’s a way to avoid unnecessary disruption of learning and, for holidays such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the college likes to hold programming commemorating those kinds of special events. Also, as a result of not taking many days off during the school year, FLC is usually one of the first colleges in the country to hold graduation in the summer. Not only does this mean that school ends sooner, but FLC graduates also get a jump on getting into the job market.
“I’d say that most see that as a worthy trade off,” Davis said.
jhaug@durangoherald.com
