Elon experiences: Ancient camcorders, college radio stations, and road trips

This is the latest entry in my series of biographical entries. Here, I talk about a few different experiences I had while at college at Elon.

Now that the hurdle of my social difficulties in the freshman year of college was behind me, it was time to start focusing on what I actually wanted to do with my life. One thing college did, repeatedly, was take me out of my comfort zone. In this piece I will talk about three experiences in particular that caused me to have to come to terms with my autistic identity and do something new.

Digital Media Convergence

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life when I went to Elon, but I had settled on journalism. I had excelled in my journalism class in high school, my journalism teacher wrote me a glowing letter of recommendation that helped me get into college in the first place, and it just seemed like something I wanted to do. During my freshman year, I mostly focused on general ed, only taking two journalism classes, both of which were enjoyable, especially since one of them focused on writing. In my fall semester sophomore year, however, I hit a significant hurdle when I had to take digital media convergence, a class that was required in order for me to take many upper-level classes in the major. It was a class that focused specifically on shooting videos with a camera and then recording and editing them. I met my professor before the semester even started, to discuss my disability (something which I was now more comfortable with) and acknowledge that I might have difficulties. We discussed some possible plans for modifying assignments, including partnering up with a friend.

The hardest part of class for me was actually in the first few weeks, where we were expected to manually operate a tripod on our own outside of class with only one class period’s worth of practice time. I knew this wasn’t going to work well for me, so I ended up proactively e-mailing the professor and we made a modified version of the assignment.

My friend Matt was thankfully in the same section as me, and he was willing to supervise my video shooting to make sure that I did it successfully without breaking any equipment. We also were required to show our videos in class in front of everyone, an awkward experience because I realized the quality of my video was inferior to most of what my other classmates were putting out even though I knew the design principles I should be using, but I went through with it anyway. The story I told in my 3-minute video based upon a dream I had sometime in sophomore year. I was staying at a rundown hotel with some friends while on a road trip from Texas to Colorado, and we were greeted by some strange men who agreed to let us stay at the hotel for a reduced rate if we found 4 decks of playing cars and helped stack them in order by suit (a very autistic story). It took us forever to find the cards, and apparently it took long for the men who ended up pointing guns at our heads just as we were finishing! The story certainly had drama, intrigue, and potential for special effects to be added, so it was good enough for me. Once we got into editing with Final Cut Pro, things were at least confined to the computer, but still difficult for me as my lack of spatial reasoning sometimes caused me to make incorrect editing decisions. I had no perspective of what a good “shot” was, and sometimes I would awkwardly cut my friend’s head out of a shot and not realize it, among other issues. Despite all this, however, I persevered and ended up with a B+ in the class. I have never been the type to back out of something once I start it.

Despite this, however, when I looked ahead in the course catalog, I realized that there were more required classes that often had video components that would be even more difficult than this one was. I also took an English class in that same semester that I really enjoyed. While I was skeptical that an English major would be able to get me a job, I realized that writing and editing were really what I enjoyed doing, more than actually reporting news and more than shooting video. Thus, even though I made it through the entire class, I changed my major to avoid taking any further similar classes. I did end up minoring in journalism, since I had already taken 3 classes and only needed to take 3 more in my remaining time at Elon to complete the minor, but I purposely avoided classes that I knew had intensive video production, largely because I had enough challenges going on in my day-to-day social life that I avoided challenges where possible in my academic life.

College Radio Station

One activity I did that met with considerably more success was working for the college radio station. I started doing this in freshman year, when my friend Paul who was also really interested in music got involved. However, I decided to host a show by myself. At the time, the college radio station at Elon was a hybrid between an automated computer system and CDs. Applying for the radio station was not a difficult process, which I was thankful for. There were no interviews required; we simply had to complete a day of training before we were thrown on air. We were required to burn CDs of our shows and give them to a staff member to review, so any problems could be addressed after we had already started recording shows, and not before. This gave us the opportunity to learn on the job and make our own mistakes, something important but also stressful at first. Like all freshmen, I started off playing a “format” show, where we were primarily obligated to play the preferred format of the show, alternative rock. However, we were allowed to play 4 songs an hour from our own collection, as long as we didn’t stray too far off the beaten path of the station’s format. I enjoyed this opportunity to share my music with the world very much, even though I was never sure how many people were listening at any given time.  Artists I remember playing include System of a Down, Muse, Porcupine Tree, and naturally a show where all 8 of my personal songs were by Pearl Jam, my favorite band at the time. The gig also introduced me to a lot of good new music.

The challenge, however, was changing CDs out, keeping a log, and maintaining entertaining “talking” breaks where I introduced the songs. It was always a balancing act where I was barely keeping up, especially at first. The studio had a 3 CD changer, so I was only able to plan ahead 3 songs at a time. I eventually started planning in advance, burning all of my 8 songs from my personal library onto a CD each week and bringing that CD into the studio, to decrease the number of times I would have to change CDs. My old CD collection has survived all of my moves, and I continue to periodically discover these radio station CDs to this day.  I do think, however, that it made my poor executive functioning skills, better, because suddenly I had to concentrate on several things at one time: making sure the song playing right now was playing correctly, making sure I had the CDs I wanted to play next lined up and ready to go, making sure I had the ads lined up and ready to go, and making sure I talked at the right time and in the proper fashion, turning the mics up to the proper volume. While I dreaded this process at first, it was something I grew to love by sophomore year, and it was ultimately a staple of my life during my first three years at Elon.

Highway 64

A third experience I had in college was when I got to spend a weekend traveling highway 64 for travel writing class. We split up into groups of 2-3 for this assignment, and whoever grouped up with me would have the misfortune of having to do all the driving because I couldn’t, but thankfully my friend Dan was up to the task. We left on a Friday evening and didn’t get back until Sunday afternoon, staying overnight at a relative of Dan’s for the two nights. This was truly my first experience of western North Carolina culture or really any culture at all. We went out to eat at a famous hot dog place in Statesville. There, we saw a sign for a lawnmower racing tournament, but unfortunately the tournament was not occurring the same weekend we were there. It was also my first experience traveling down a rural highway. While I spent much of high school in the car traveling between Connecticut and North Carolina, we traveled mostly down I-95, getting used to intense city driving. Highway 64 was something else entirely. The highway seemed to veer left and right at will. There were times when signs disappeared altogether for 10 miles, and Dan and I became suddenly certain that we were on the wrong road, only to then have signs re-emerge. There were times when we got stuck behind a slow car traveling 30 mph for 20 minutes, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it, which was very unlike I-95 or fast-paced, Connecticut driving. We also traveled in fall 2008 right before the election, and it was interesting to notice the number of McCain/Palin signs sharply increase as we traveled westward in comparison to the number of Obama signs.

Visiting the town of Bat Cave was also an interesting experience. It has a gift shop full of bat memorabilia that we visited where we talked to locals around the town. However, getting in and out of Bat Cave was an even bigger adventure. When we left the gift shop, we were oblivious to the fact that the proper turn for Highway 64 was ¼ mile before our stop. We proceeded for 20 miles along the windiest roads imaginable and eventually reached Asheville before determining that we missed a turn. Unhappily, we turned around and traveled back along the same windy roads. However, Dan spotted an oddity – a road diverging off the highway that seemed to travel straight uphill. He decided to turn up it to see where it led. We got to the top only to discover that it led nowhere – and, in fact, the only way down it was to back all the way up in reverse. Over the next five minutes, I put my life in Dan’s hands as we slowly backed up down the entire length of the huge hill, laughing the whole time. It was an experience I’ll never forget, as I’d never seen a road like that before.

To this day, I still have a travel bug, and I blame this trip for starting it. It was the first chance I’d really gotten to explore the culture of a new place by myself, and I greatly enjoyed the experience. Even though I am still not able to drive, I discovered later on that, thanks to buses and Uber rides, I still have the ability to do my own exploration.

Conclusion

Overall, these three experiences are just three of many examples of how I had growing experiences at Elon. In the case of the digital media convergence project, I took a class that required a skillset which happened to include areas where I knew I was lacking due to my autism, but I managed to overcome those flaws, working around them as needed, to complete the class and finish my own video, something I’d never dreamed of doing before. In the case of the college radio station, I combined something I loved (music) with areas outside of my comfort zone (talking to people live on air and juggling many tasks at once) to develop another task I enjoyed. Finally, in the case of the highway 64 project, I took a trip with a new friend for an entire weekend and learned more about Western North Carolinian culture. While I discussed in previous chapters how college, especially freshman year, was especially hard for me, it also provided me many fun growing experiences. Sometimes, all a person who has stayed in the comfort of doing the same things for their whole lives with their family needs to grow is new adventures and experiences, and Elon provided me with that.