cool brochure that said “join our community of scholars.” I thought that sounded cool and I was especially interested in the Arts and Letters Engineering program. I never visited and I didn’t even realize that it had only gone co-ed just two years earlier. I vaguely knew it was a football school and was Catholic.
Ha! Other surprises at Notre Dame? How would you describe? Did you feel prepared?
Tons of surprises. I spent my entire Freshman year, thinking that I had made a terrible mistake going to Notre Dame. I looked seriously into transferring. I had been used to feeling like a fish out of water, but I felt more fish out of water that year than I had ever felt in my life.
I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming Catholic-ness and whiteness of the place. Many of my classmates had gone to private Catholic School and had never attended school with a black person (since not many black kids in those days went to suburban or even urban Catholic schools).
But it wasn’t just the racial composition of the place. It was the religious composition of the place. Now I had been raised in a religious household, so it wasn’t religion per se that got in my way. Notre Dame was like 97% Catholic. Catholicism came at you from every pore of the University. From the rectors in the dorms, from many professors, from students. Many were not just casual Catholics but intensely committed Catholics. Again, I had Catholic friends and acquaintances in High School. But here I was surrounded. Immersed in a frankly alien culture. At first I was miserable.
So no, I wasn’t prepared for Notre Dame. Eventually, though, I came to actually love the place. It had a very profound effect on my intellectual, moral, and social development as a person, an effect that endures even today.
Why did
you
move away from engineering?
I started out as a double major in Electrical Engineering (with a Computer Engineering emphasis), since there was no Computer Science major anywhere when I went to college…and Psychology. I regarded Psychology as my “second” major. Remember, I went to Notre Dame to be a well-roundedengineer. Sophomore year, I dropped psychology and picked up the Program of Liberal Studies as my second major. Junior year, a dropped EE and picked up Math as my primary major. I got some less than stellar grades in advanced math courses during junior year. That made me believe that I although I was decent enough at mathematics, I did not have what it takes to get
