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I applied to Indiana University, University of
Indianapolis, and then here.
I think the first time we came, he really liked it.
But we all kind of thought, no, you're not going to go six
hours away.
It met all the criteria that I was looking for,
so, I said, why not?
I think as a kid, he's not given into impulses.
But once he goes, he goes.
So it's been an adventure.
I wanted to be an RA my sophomore year
but didn't get it.
Then I lived off campus my junior year.
We did a lot of training in the fall, and then did a lot
of paperwork at the beginning, but once you got
going, it was just fun.
Reid was an RA for us for one year in Tutt Hall.
And he was a very a very good role model for the students,
especially in the area of academics.
I like just getting to know people, getting to know my
staff, getting to know people on my floor,
hanging out with people.
And I can't believe they paid me.
I would've done it for free.
It was a great experience.
They are policy enforcers, they're mediator, a
programmer, an educator, a role model.
They're the person who we hope most of ours students go to
when they're in need.
Those are always tough, when someone has gotten in trouble,
or had a policy violation because you have to be
intentional about having those conversations and being really
deliberate in your
relationship with other people.
So it's something I've learned in this job.
My goal is that he just go out and give it all he has so
he'll always be proud of that.
I think he's a guy who checks out the
terrain before he jumps.
He researched the field and decided that's
where he wants to go.
My major is political science.
My minor is criminology.
Right now, if I get accepted to the PhD programs, I'll look
to get my PhD then become a professor.
And if not, then I'll do some nonprofit work.
There's contact.
There's conflict.
There's accommodation.
And finally, there's assimilation as members--
He's from Nigeria so he has a different perspective.
He can kind of bring in his own experiences and talk to us
about them.
I like it a lot just because it's discussion-based.
He'll force you to share your thoughts with the class.
I mean, African Americans I think in general view
themselves as American, just like people whose heritage
have been here for so many years.
But maybe if you're a first generation person, or second
generation, then maybe you feel differently.
What I think adds a lot--
because everyone has their own perspective, their own
experiences, so there's a lot of lively discussion, based on
the reading, based off film clips they watch.
If I don't have your email address, it'd be great if
we'll just send it around and you can add it.
Make sure I can read it.
We try to keep you as informed as we can.
I didn't really choose wrestling.
Wrestling kind of chose me, I'd say.
My dad's a wrestling coach, and my brothers wrestled, and
of course if my brothers are going to wrestle, I have to
wrestle so I can beat them.
It's I age-old question about wrestling.
Because there are times when it's not fun at all.
It's just, wake up a 6:30 in the morning.
You think, wow it's a drag, or cutting weight is horrible,
but I think it's the competition.
It's the one-on-one factor.
I'm going to go out there, you're going to go out there.
Ref blows the whistle.
Let's see who's better.
You want to be the national champion, and you want to be
an all-American.
That's what everyone strives for, same with me.
We obviously want to win our conference.
Our conference championship is a big deal, huge deal in our
state and in our sport.
Pretty tough kid.
I wrestled him few times.
He's beaten me.
But in wrestling, you worry more about what you're going
to do than what the other guy's going to do.
So I thought, all right, do my thing and I should be fine.
I feel like we're pretty prepared, so I'm ready to go
and get out there.
I feel confident.
I feel in shape.
I feel like I got a good strategy.
The coach puts these matches on our schedule for a purpose.
Because he wants us to face a tough competition early.
That way we can build on it for the whole year.
One, two, three.
The final score of the match is eight to three.
The winner for the Eagles under decision, 174 pounds,
Mike [? Schmidt. ?]
They beat us again.
So that was frustrating, hard to take.
This year's been hard.
There's been some tough matches.
It's not going like Reid would like it to go.
Through wrestling, I learned how to ask people for help.
Because one thing I've realized being in college is,
people who are better than you and they're in your position,
you want to go to them and see how they got
to where they are.
I think he's probably had some things that
have tested his faith.
He lost a dear friend in a car accident right before he came
back for his junior year.
I've never seen him quit anything.
I'm proud of him for that.
I think grad school was probably always in
the back of his mind.
And the McNair program just really helped
solidify that for him.
The purpose of the program is to prepare students to get a
PhD and to be eligible for careers as college faculty,
and help diversify the college faculty.
Reid, because he was part of the McNair Scholars Program--
they have a really specifically laid-out plan for
undergraduate research.
And so all of the students in that program are required to
participate in undergraduate research.
It is a student-centered activity.
Students are driving the research.
They are trying to find the answers to questions that
they, themselves, are passionate about.
The goal of basic research is to be published.
I'm in this methods class.
We're doing our own research project.
We did our literature review already, and now we're going
to collect our own data--
how the level of your parental involvement during high
school, how does that impact how well a student does when
they're in college.
Every group in the class has to send out 80 surveys.
At this point, it's really hard because there's so many
loose ends.
Like my grades are at the point where they could go
either way.
I could get A's or I get B's or I get a B or get a C. So
that's kind of weighing on my mind heavy.
It's been interesting.
We've had a lot of times, some students who performed well in
their high school, but needed some additional reinforcement
in order to be competitive for graduate school.
One of the things that Reid and I spent a lot time working
on was his decision about going to graduate school.
So as an adviser, it was--
how do you pick a school?
And what kind of considerations do you take
into account?
So Reid came to the table with a lot of ideas already about
what he wanted to do, and where he might want to go.
Right now, I'm applying to some graduate
schools to study sociology.
Please list all sociology courses
taken and grades received.
I didn't realize how much work it would be to do all these
applications.
I'm thinking about doing 8 to 10 applications.
So that's been kind of hard.
Hawks on three.
One, two, three.
We wrestled the number one, two, three, four, and six team
from division three from last year's national tournament in
the first semester.
So, a little bit of a challenge or a test, I think,
in that first semester, and since we've come back after
Christmas, we've seen some dividends from that, wrestling
those strong schools early.
I think it's very impressive that somebody can dedicate as
much as they do and sacrifice for the sport of wrestling,
which I think is unique, how much a student athlete has to
sacrifice to be successful in this sport.
I don't think anybody gets too upset.
There's a little bit of blood.
You just wrap it up and keep going.
That's kind of the mentality, just patch it up.
Keep wrestling.
Getting your hand raised is like the best feeling.
Winning those matches is great, and then of course,
hanging out with your teammates.
We were kind of nervous coming in to school.
Freshman year, we didn't talk too much, but we got really
close sophomore, junior, and senior year.
I roomed with him my junior year, and he's definitely a
great friend and a great guy.
It feels good to have another option because before, like
two weeks ago, I didn't have any options.
Now I got accepted to Northern Arizona, University of Iowa,
Mississippi State, University of Oklahoma, and Northern
Illinois have offered on-campus interviews.
So, when they ask you, tell us about some of your
experiences, I could say, I was in undergraduate research,
I was a student athlete, resident assistant.
That's one thing that graduate recruiters over the years look
for in students and they value highly.
This spring, hopefully the goal is to present my research
at the National Undergraduate Research Conference in Utah.
So I submitted my abstract last week, and I'll be hearing
back from them in a month, probably.
So that'd be awesome to be able to go there.
So the undergraduate research process, you start with the--
you're coming up with your idea, and with the abstract,
and then putting together your research design.
Those are the same things that you do in graduate school when
you're writing a dissertation, or even when you're writing a
paper in grad school.
So I think that students who participate in undergraduate
research who want to go to grad school really get a
special bonus.
I think that undergraduate research is great for everyone
because even if you're not going to go to graduate
school, people in most work environments have to give
presentations.
They have to know how to speak on their feet, and so one of
the things that the undergraduate research program
does is require students to present their
work to a wide audience.
And I think that that's helpful to anyone, no matter
what field they go into.
And so he came to me with this really neat idea about looking
at hate crimes and reporting on college campuses, and he
wanted to do this study that looked at different statistics
and compared them across different schools.
And so, he and I sat down, and we thought about how we could
make that much narrower.
It opened my eyes to the challenges of research that I
wasn't aware of before.
I had to scale it down and kind of rethink
what I wanted to do.
So, I think what I have now is going to be pretty solid.
He'd been offered a pretty good assistant-ship at
Mississippi State.
But he wasn't sure whether or not he'd be able to get into
the academic program that he wanted to get into.
And then Northern Arizona offered him admission to the
program, but he really wanted to go to Mississippi State.
It wasn't a sure thing at Mississippi State, and so we
talked about being risk-averse and kind of going for it.
And I talked about my experiences and some of the
decisions that I made in deciding about going to
graduate school.
She puts it all on the table.
And that's something I appreciate about her.
She doesn't sugarcoat things.
It's a tougher conversation to have, because sometimes
students want you to really help them make that decision
and I can't do that.
Well, I just got an email the other day saying that my
extract got accepted, so I'll be going to Utah come spring
break to present my research.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
Many students actually comment that this is one of the
highlights of the entire college career because now,
they get to present the work in a national conference.
It was kind of cool to get out there, see what everyone's
researching and talk to them, do a little networking.
Whitewater is usually very well-represented.
It's usually among the top, if not the top in the event.
Most of them will have their own poster, their own area
where people are going to walk around and ask you questions.
You can tell them about your project.
When people think research and think of writing reports, you
think mostly of the hard sciences, and you don't
realize how much research is done in the social sciences.
Political science major and criminology minor, so there's
a lot of ways it kind of connects.
So what I'm looking at is how student organizations on
college campuses raise awareness for hate crimes and
what people should do about them.
Some people don't even agree that we should
have hate crime reporting.
But, it's an interesting topic to me, because it's so
complicated.
It was bad how it happened, but it was neat how people
came together afterwards.
So that's what got me interested in it.
A lot of times, when students come from first generation or
low-income backgrounds, they have not done as much
traveling and so, given a chance to do something like go
to Ogden, Utah, and fly out there and meet students from
all over the country--
It allows them to be more competitive.
The conference tournaments are the kind of thing where you
can turn around your season because if you do well, you
get to go to nationals.
If you don't do as well, your season's over.
La Crosse, they're a team that's--
they've beaten us every year.
Every time we face them, they come out strong and we have a
tough time against them.
And it feels nice to get them at the end for once.
I fell short of my goals that I set out at the
beginning of the year--
as an individual, which is kind of disappointing, but it
kind of worked out in the end because we accomplished pretty
much all of our team goals that we set out for.
So that was nice to come together as a team in the end
and finally win the WIAC Tournament.
It will set in next fall, next winter, when everyone else is
getting ready to wrestle again.
That's when I'll really realize that it's over.
When I look back, a lot of things that I've learned about
myself, a lot of the most important lessons I've learned
have come from the wrestling mat, from the wrestling room,
from being out on the pavement running.
You really learn a lot about yourself.
So I ended up turning down the offer at Northern Arizona
without even knowing if I was going to for sure get into
Mississippi State.
So it was kind of nerve-wracking in the past
couple weeks, but to finally hear back from Mississippi
State, that I got into the school-- it's a good weight
off my shoulders.
So, I might have gone with the sure thing, but there's
reasons why you shouldn't go with the sure thing
necessarily.
I mean, ultimately, he went with what felt better.
Before I decided to wrestle, before I decided to become an
RA, before I decided to do an undergraduate research
project, I was really nervous about it, or apprehensive
about doing it.
But then, once I did it and got into it, I became
comfortable in it, so don't be scared to be uncomfortable and
make mistakes.
Because you'll be fine.
I think Reid will be successful no matter where he
goes because he's just a really good guy and a hard
worker, and I think that it'll work out for him.
In the end, what did you do in college?
I took classes.
No one really cares that you took classes.
Everyone takes classes.
They care what you do outside of class.
That's something that these four years grew me into it as,
being able to take more risk and try to go for different
opportunities.
My experience at Whitewater really is going to hinge on
what happens afterward.
But I feel like, there's a pretty good
chance I'll be set.