Summarizer Ch. 2 Natalie

The second chapter of the book focuses on the things Rebekah sees and notices as she's walking through the dorms, listening in on her first hall meeting, and experiencing class as a student not a teacher. She describes the insane amount of things in each dorm room and that the biggest change for her was seeing lofts. She describes the different subliminal messages on boards, pictures of friends, funny sayings, and all the information RA's put up to make students aware and get them involved. She sees how unimportant the hall meetings are to students even the "absolutely positively mandatory ones" (pg 29). The first week of school, before classes started, she witnessed all the craziness and liveliness of dorm life it wasn't until classes began that "real dorm life, as I began to know it, began" (pg 31). As college life began she was filled with questions and it wasn't until she "began to do interviews and collect time diaries from other students, that i would begin to notice the patterns and patterned variations in student life" (pg 32). She begins to follow 10 students in their daily life. She gives a clear description on each student; what they are involved with, what a day in their life looks like, their eating and sleeping habits, and the daily struggles they face as a college student. She finds two things to be true in her studying. First, "there is little that is automatically shared among people by virtue of attending the same university [and secondly] one can easily opt to move out of the dorm, drop the class, change majors, or quit the club, resulting in a social world that always seems to b in flux. In this light, the university becomes, for individual students, an optional set of activities and a fluid set of people whose paths are ever-shifting" (pg 39-40).