Biggest Difference Is You Want To Learn

Sat., July 8, 2000

Sam Davenport Special To Handle

For most students, summer means fun and sun.

But for some, summer represents a time to move from the small, safe world of high school to the cosmopolitan world of the university.

Graduating seniors who are pursuing higher education have sent in most of the appropriate forms, a process that can be overwhelming.

So a few tips from the inside are helpful:

Abbot Taylor will be a sophomore at the University of Puget Sound this fall. When he graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School last year, he was one of a dozen valedictorians. He had taken every advanced placement class offered at CHS and all but one of the honors programs.

Taylor is pursuing a history major at UPS and has maintained a 3.58 grade-point average. Even though Taylor moved from a town of about 30,000 to the much larger Tacoma area, he felt very little change.

“Surprisingly, there weren’t too many changes. UPS is in a bubble. The most traveling I would do is like going into Sea-Tac for everybody, because nobody has a car,” Taylor said. “I mean nobody.

“Everybody actually wants to learn - which is nice,” he said, comparing college to high school. “Yeah, that’s the biggest difference. I mean, most everybody is there to learn. It makes being in class easier when you get rid of those people that hate class.”

He said UPS is also “very white upper-class, there is hardly any diversity.”

His advice to incoming college freshmen?

“In your generic classes where nobody wants to talk: talk,” Taylor said. “Sucking up still works. High school taught me how to suck up.”

Of course, not all of college is about studying and classes. College students spend most of their time on campus. Besides the usual drinking and recreational drug use, students will go to creative lengths to have a good time.

“What do I do to relax? Got the old-school Nintendo,” Taylor said. “And we invented the game of egg golf.”

He recalled how he and a friend went to Costco, where a vendor fishing for e-mail addresses gave them 18 free eggs.

“We’re sitting around and we’re like `What are we gonna do with 18 eggs?’ It dawns on both of us, like simultaneously. We just grabbed a golf club and went outside.”

The eggs don’t actually go anywhere, Taylor said, “so it helps to wear a pair of old pants.”

Taylor will be returning to UPS in the fall, but is moving out of the dorms that he has come to call home. He’ll be sharing a house with three girls.

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