Rebekah Nathan My Freshman Year Summary

Rebekah Nathan, a professor at AnyU and author of "My Freshman Year", looks into the life of a college undergraduate student. Nathan's primary methodology was participant observation (p. 5). By going from being a professor to an undergraduate student, the little things had to change. She turned into a piece of the field work, needed to utilize individual exposure, and needed to lose objectivity in order to stay focused and on track with her research. Nathan came across a few difficulties along the way due to her choice of methodology and the fact that she was much older than the average college undergraduate student. However, going through the challenges she had to face lead her to some discoveries about students of the college while also living as a student herself. Due to Nathan's primary methodology of research, there were issues she
She did not necessarily fit in with the other undergraduate students because of her age. On the first day of college she was mistaken as a parent instead of a student because of what she wore during the welcoming week. But it was mostly the people who were not part of Nathan's dorm hall who had mistaken her as a parent of one of the students attending the college. One of the RAs on Nathan's hall saw her eating dinner and drinking a beer in the dorm lounge and confronted her about it. Rebekah Nathan was clueless that drinking an alcoholic beverage in the dorm lounge was not allowed and she knew that she could not say anything that would blow her undergrad cover because then it would ruin her whole observation. Nathan started to realize that becoming an undergrad student and fitting in with the rest was harder than she thought it would be. The university offered students a wide variety of things to do such as "...being in a fraternity, going out for a sport, or living off campus…"