KWC Part 4: Ruminations

Author's Note: It's been a busy week, so I kind of half-assed this installment. Sorry, not sorry.

Pledging continued, and a few guys who didn’t go through the official rush joined during open rush a couple of weeks later.

Those of us who were freshmen settled into a new post-high school reality. For most of us, it was the first time we were away from home for an extended period. No parents, no siblings, no pets. Our accustomed safety nets were suddenly anything from a quick phone call to a road trip lasting a day or more.

For all of us, pre-college education was muscle reflex. We had all had 12 or more years of being in the same schools with the same people—we were good at what we were good at, and bad at what we were bad at, and it was mostly consistent. We were comfortable.

College was different. Our new freedoms were exciting or devastating. Sink or swim. There was no try, only do or do not. And one’s reactions to any of these oxymorons were crucial. Some of us brought entrenched good or bad habits with us, and some of us got new ones and made them worse. Freedom, for better or worse.

Occasional (illegal) drinking with friends in high school might turn into binge drinking (illegally) almost every Friday and Saturday (maybe more often). If you hid your smoking at home (or even if you didn’t), you were almost certain to ramp it up while you were “away at college.” And, yes, even (or maybe especially) a Methodist college was sometimes a place to discover drugs—mostly pot, but sometimes speed or even acid. And there was at least one heralded incident when a student was heard to cry, after crashing her car into multiple vehicles in the admin building parking lot, “but I only did one ‘lude!”

Photo © 2026, T.J. Seputis

Classes weren’t a whole lot different from high school—more focused, maybe, more regimented, but if you studied and kept up, you would be OK. Professors and instructors might sometimes be intimidating at first, but after a couple of weeks, you know what they expect of you and what to expect of them. After freshman year, things would get more difficult as you focused on a major and the 200-levels, but the freshman year was basically the senior year of high school with sprinkles.

This is a very long way of saying that I did pretty well academically in my first semester at KWC. And I had a good time.

Which is a lot of the reason Dad called KWC “the country club.” He wanted me to go to Murray State, or UK (inexpensive in-state schools), or Indiana University at Bloomington, or (after the family moved to Tucson before my sophomore year) the University of Arizona.

Being a private college, KWC was much more expensive than any of those at almost $6,000 a semester, and I was oblivious to the fact that my family was not made of money. I had a scholarship and a loan for that first year, but after that, it was a real effort on everyone’s part to make sure I would be the first in our family to graduate from college. Work/study, scholarship loans, summer jobs, begging (not really, but it sometimes felt like begging) just to be able to write BA, Political Science on job applications for the next 50 years.

One thing I never got used to, though, was having a friend one semester and then, next semester, they would be gone—transferred, washed out, or priced out—never to be heard from again. I understand now, because I was almost priced out every semester. The sheer stubbornness I inherited from Dad probably saved me there.

© 2026, Brian G Parker