From this isolated experience, however, I became more careful about how I spoke on campus. I made a conscious effort to “de-yooper-ize” my accent by trying not to elongate my vowel sounds. I tried to listen to and imitate how students from downstate talked, in particular. It was a totally foreign concept to me to be ridiculed or thought of as stupid: throughout my entire life, people had always been proud of me and of my accomplishments. I tried not to sound like a yooper on campus because I had become aware that some people thought I sounded uneducated or stupid because of the way I spoke. I wanted to fit in here at MTU.

Though this change may have helped me to fit in on campus, it began to alienate me at home. As I started to tone down my yooper accent on campus, it became a habit and my parents thought I sounded funny when I went home. It was almost as though I had to become two different people, the school Beth and the home Beth. At school I was supposed to fit in with the crowd, which meant changing how I had always acted, like refraining from using my yooper dialect. At home I was supposed to be the same person my family and friends had always known, but they didn’t realize how much college could change a person and they weren’t very accepting of how I had changed. I was really beginning to hate it—I fit in a little more at school, but a lot less at home! It was the ultimate catch-22.

Click here to see a Quicktime video of Beth working at the Writing Center

It was at the end of my freshman year that I finally decided that I couldn’t possibly please everybody. I started to do things more for myself than for anybody else. I found an apartment for the next school year with a few girls from my hall in the dorms, and I stayed in Houghton for the first half of the summer to take a couple of classes. After I spent the rest of my summer working at Tulppo’s and hanging out with my friends at home, I was ready to start school again, this time with my new attitude.

I wanted to become more involved and respected on campus and I also wanted to find a part-time job in Houghton so I wouldn’t have to go home to work. I solved both of these problems by applying for and getting hired as a writing center coach. Becoming a writing coach was a great way for me to take on some added responsibility, similar to my high school involvement in student government. I was able to use my academic experience to help students with their writing. More important to me, I was able to use my experiences at Tech to understand how the first-year students I worked with were feeling and to try to help them to adjust to life here at Tech. I just wanted to feel more involved and needed on campus. I did not want to be just another face in the crowd anymore. I also became very close friends with my new roommates, especially Angie, who is also from the U.P. It was really great to be able to talk to somebody who was going through the same things as I was! We ended up becoming great friends and finding all kinds of fun things to do. We would go out to grab lunch or dinner, go to parties, go to movies, or just hang out at our apartment. It was more comfortable to me, like a glorified reproduction of my great high school years. I had found my niche on campus, with my involvement in the writing center and my newfound balance between friends and studying.