This is Part 8 of the 10 Years of 10 Words series. You can find Part 7 (Chicago) here.
When I was an undergrad at Valpo, I had all these very specific, idiosyncratic rules for how I would talk about college. Rule number one: I never used the word “college.” I always called it “school,” because that’s what it was: a continuation of the formal education I’d been pursuing all my life to that point. I didn’t like the cultural baggage associated with the word “college.” It reminded me of all the drunken, raucous stereotypes of higher education from all those 80’s movies I haven’t actually seen. That wasn’t at all what my own experience was like, and I didn’t want others to get that impression of me. “School” better reflected why I felt I was there: primarily to learn.
For many of the same reasons, I didn’t like calling my residence hall a “dorm.” Dormitory comes from the Latin word for “sleep,” suggesting it isn’t much of a living space. When I was younger, I always had the impression that a “dorm” was a dumpy little closet barely large enough to fit a bed. I actually felt like I had plenty of space in the building I lived in (at least as an upperclassman). So I just called it “my room” to prime people to imagine a space more like a bedroom. I also refused to call Founders Table the cafeteria, but for what it’s worth, I think everybody called the main dining hall on campus “Founders.” I felt cafeteria gave an unfair impression of mass-produced, low-quality food. Founders was better than that, although dedicated readers of this blog will recall my feelings about Founders food are…complicated.
I adhered strictly to these rules while I was a student at Valpo, but after I graduated, I pretty much immediately threw them all out the window. My college experience was now in the past tense, and I realized to effectively describe my time there to other people, I’d need to use the set of words they were familiar with, cultural baggage and all. I love Valpo with all my heart, and I firmly believe it is a uniquely wonderful school that attracts a uniquely wonderful type of person. But very few of the day-to-day interactions that happen there require my special vocabulary to be understood.
The way we use words is evolving all the time: new slang becomes popular, old slang falls out of style, and we adapt old words to mean new things. It’s kind of a rite of passage in everyone’s first year of college to adopt the new vocabulary of higher education. (I still don’t like the word freshman; it’s gendered and sounds a little too much like you’re selling meat.) Your teachers are no longer Mr. or Mrs., but Professor and Doctor. You no longer have “periods,” but Tuesday/Thursdays and Eight-AMs and labs. Then there’s dining dollars, gen-eds, TAs, RAs, flex cash, and something called a registrar, which it turns out you’ll be dealing with for the next decade as you graduate and start seeking professional licensure from state boards who understandably want to know whether your degree exists. (But I digress.)
College really is a whole new world, but most students seem to adjust long before the end of their first year. I transitioned into all this new vocabulary with the same awkward stumbles as everyone else–like spending the first few months feeling weird about using the term “professor” because made me feel like I was in a movie. But it apparently took me two years to stop using the word “test” and start calling them “exams.”
Here’s a cumulative plot for “Exam” and “Test” in the 10 Words. (Check out Part 3 for more on how that works.)
I can’t imagine I’d ever be able to explain the difference between an exam and a test to someone whose native language isn’t English. In my mind, an exam is more formal than a test. Or at the very least, an exam carries more weight when it comes to determining your final grade. But your perspective may vary depending on how your teachers used the terms throughout your primary education. In those first two high school years of 10 Words, I clearly stuck to calling them “tests.” The only “exams” we took in high school were the all-important end-of-semester Final Exams. High school really made finals out to be a big deal. There was a special schedule where the day would be split into 3 periods and you’d have something like two hours to take your exam. The longest Scantrons I’ve ever filled out in my life came in those hours. I think the school purposefully used different terminology for Final Exams than they did for plain old tests to set them apart and intimidate us into taking them seriously. Even the most singularly consequential exam you take in high school – the ACT or the SAT – isn’t called an exam, but a “standardized test.”
In college, the stakes are raised. No more intimidation tactics are required; you’re here because you’re paying to be here, not because the state mandates it. Gone were the days of taking three “tests” throughout the semester; newly arrived was the era of the “Midterm Exam,” or simply “midterms.” (NB: There is only one mention of the word “midterm” in the 10 Words, so apparently that’s not what I called them.)
You can tell from this graph that I started using the word “exam” in the 10 Words immediately after beginning my first semester at Valpo. The vertical red line milestones on the graph are placed on move-in day each year. You can see how the graph flattens out just before the beginning of the next school year during my exam-free summers (GRE excluded).
Reading through the 10 Words, it actually looks like I was arbitrarily switching between “test” and “exam” for the first two years of college. But the graph makes it apparent that I essentially quit using “test” cold turkey at the beginning of my junior year. You can see “exam” continues to be mentioned steadily beyond what I call “College Graduation” up until May 2015, when I finished grad school, whereas “test” plateaus out. This is one of those changes I had no idea was happening until I stumbled upon it while digging through the 10 Words. I can’t point to a particular moment where something clicked and I consciously made this change in speech and thinking. But I think I know what happened: I hit a wall called Being a Junior In College.
I don’t know or remember exactly what I expected my civil engineering classes would be like when I first arrived on campus in Fall 2010. And I wouldn’t really find out until the following spring, because the first semester of Valpo’s program places civil, mechanical, electrical, and computer engineers into the same general classes. So my only glimpse of what was ahead came from the upperclassmen and women I met in student organizations like Engineers Without Borders. These older students often seemed, to put it mildly, stressed out. Especially the juniors and seniors. They complained about all the late hours they’d spend in the engineering building working on lab reports and design projects. And they would carry around these huge reference manuals and tell horror stories about exams written by professors who taught subjects so advanced, I wouldn’t have any reason to meet them until I took two years of prerequisites. How in the world could I ever be expected to understand all this? Was I about to tank my life-long academic success? College administrators didn’t need to engage in any scare tactics for me to be pretty alarmed.
Having been sufficiently warned by the brave souls ahead of me, I braced myself for the shoe to drop. First semester kept me busy–I was working and studying harder than I ever had in high school–but it was completely manageable. I wasn’t studying late into the night. I had plenty of free time. I didn’t feel overwhelmed or fall behind. So when we moved into Semester 2 and started our first 100 level civil engineering classes, I was sure a wave was about to crash down. But I kept plugging along, and before I knew it, sophomore year came and went. Things did become more challenging. I started working later and longer, including on weekends. But by and large, the workload wasn’t nearly as scary as the older students led me to believe. I made it through not very differently than I did in high school– mostly by giving myself plenty of time to figure things out on my own. I didn’t find myself going to my classmates very often for homework help or to study for midterms (or whatever they’re called).
Junior year was different. There were no humanities courses or science prerequisites left to take. In that fall semester, my schedule consisted of five upper-level civil engineering classes with the same 20 people in the same hallway of the same building. There were group lab reports and group design projects and incessant homework with the dreaded reference manuals. My classmates and I basically made a second home for ourselves between the red-painted walls of the general computer lab. I started installing Spotify on my favorite lab computers. All this to say it became impossible to work independently that semester for two reasons. First and most obviously, we were in such close quarters for hours and hours each day. But second and more importantly, we were all dealing with five upper level civil engineering courses! It was a huge amount of information to process. Nobody was going to understand everything immediately, and even the top students in class were asking each other for help. Forcing us to work together was a valuable and intentional part of the program.
So I started calling them exams because my classmates were already calling them exams. But that’s the easy answer. I don’t think this shift wasn’t simply a matter of picking up a word through osmosis. I think in some way, it represents a change in how I perceived myself and my work. I had crossed some sort of threshold where I was being challenged in a way I hadn’t been before, so much so that I needed new language to describe it. “Exam” was the most serious word at a time when I had to take school more seriously than ever. And I think this shift was an implicit acknowledgement that I couldn’t get through that semester alone–that in fact, most accomplishments are collaborative in some way.
I spent a great deal of time thinking about how I could use words to shape others’ perception of my college experience. But it never occurred to me that all the while, words from other people were shaping mine.
The Real Tangent 