College success stories that inspire : lessons from inside and outside the classroom

You don’t have to be contemplating college to find yourself inspired by College Success Stories That Inspire. Contributors who have studied in a wide array of post-secondary institutions share experiences that significantly impacted their college careers and shaped their life paths going forward. What emerges loud and clear from the stories recounted in this volume is the significant impact of human encounters in determining the nature of college journeys. Critical contributors to students’ successful college experiences are engaged mentors, interactions with instructors, and the support and concern of roommates or fellow fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. Friends, faculty members, associates in student clubs and varied campus programs can often be critical in pointing students in academic directions they had never considered. But, in significant addition, writer after writer underscores the prime importance of students opening themselves to exploration of the wealth of opportunities before them on a college campus – no matter how large or small, rural or urban, Ivy League, Big 10, public or private. Take risks, the former students say, leave your comfort zone, take the class in a field totally unknown to you. Reach out for internships and consider studying abroad (whether for summer, for one semester or for an entire year). The strengths and supports needed to successfully negotiate college or graduate school remain essential in faring well in life post-academe. College Success Stories That Inspire collects these often hard-earned insights and offers the reader the benefits of these significant lessons learned.

Review by Mindy C. Reiser, Ph.D. -- a sociologist with significant higher education experience in the United States and internationally.

College Success Stories That Inspire

A review by Clay Eals

Remember the “Saturday Night Live” faux TV commercial in which Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner argue over whether a new spray-can substance called Shimmer is a dessert topping or a floor wax? Chevy Chase pops in to tell them that they’re both right. “Mmm, tastes terrific!” “And just look at that shine!”

That classic skit comes to mind when I read passages from Steven Roy Goodman’s new book, College Success Stories That Inspire (Miniver Press, 2018).

On the surface it looks like yet another straight-laced guide for making college a good experience – just the facts, ma’am, but told with a testimonial approach. That’s the floor wax.

Dig a little more deeply, however, and you will find both the dessert and its topping: a series of compelling, bite-size narratives that is hard to put down, with the bonus that each narrative has a different voice.

The stories, most covering only a page or two and focusing on events and insights from the past, burst with details and emotions about a time of life that is the very definition of formative.

College years, of course, prompt the gamut of questions: who, what, when, where, how and why, and these essays drill to the heart of what each writer, in his or her younger incarnation, hoped to become.  With concrete description and remembered dialogue, each of these mini-memoirs bursts with at least one lesson learned –- not from a textbook but from real life.

For this book, Goodman solicited remembrances anchored at colleges and universities in all corners of the United States. Helpfully, he has grouped them by theme, from making tough choices and not giving up to confronting the unexpected and summoning courage. Not unexpectedly, many of the pieces cite the sage counsel of a professor or the camaraderie of a friend.

One story focuses on the effect of an F grade on a final. Another recounts how the writer found an artistic voice in part because of an orange stepladder. Yet another details the impromptu mini-show sparked by a marching-band cymbal player during a pitch-black power outage on a college green. My own contributed essay cites how a late-night arrest during an anti-war demonstration helped form my philosophy of human connection.

I believe that it’s no accident that all of the book’s 99 entries underscore the axiom that we rarely learn anything in isolation, that instead we usually learn via the assistance and encouragement of others and, yes, our inevitable debates and discord with others. That, in fact, just might be the aggregate lesson of the book.

Barely 150 pages, this paperback does not pack a visual punch. The layout is unassuming and devoid of graphics. As I peruse each essay, I find myself wanting to see the face of its writer. But this accumulation does rightly focus on its substantive core, which is the potential to be found in the potent words of caution and inspiration.

At the end, Goodman encourages his intended readers – students in high school who are facing uncertain feelings about their future – to identify with these stories and apply them to their own lives.

“How can you combine classroom and extracurricular learning in ways that will help you during college and afterward?” he asks. “Think seriously about your willingness to go beyond where you came from.”

Certainly, Goodman’s advice is a standard nudge for the pre-college crowd. But as “Saturday Night Live” might say, wait, there’s more! Whether he intended it or not, Goodman also has served up a would-be classic textbook for language-arts teachers at any high school in America.

Easily, I can imagine a teacher asking each student to peruse the stories in this book, sign up to assume the voice of one of the writers and read that essay aloud in class. After the presentation, other students could ask questions prompting the speaker to elaborate on the message of the essay, thus immersing the entire class in the delicious, seemingly conflicting quest of forecasting the future by examining it retrospectively.

An imaginative teacher could go even further, asking students to write their own essays from their own futures looking backward, using the stories from this collection as a model. The resulting pieces would make for a great publication of its own and could be evaluated on many levels, from the mechanical to the visionary.

And that, in the end, is what Goodman’s anthology is all about – vision. The stories may be written in past tense, but they have everything to do with the future of our young people and of what our country will become.

(Clay Eals is a journalist, author and historian from West Seattle, Washington.)

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