We Are ISU: Snapshots of Student Life
Introduction
For 150 years, members of the Iowa State University community have been welcoming students to campus. From the beginning, Iowa State was open – at least nominally – to men and women, rich and poor, and any race or ethnicity. This exhibit celebrates the history of student life on this campus and takes a closer look at brief monents of time, “snapshots” if you will, spotlighting only a handful of the many students who have called Ames and Iowa State University home.
Selecting students to highlight
How does one go about condensing 150 years of student life into a single, comprehensible exhibit? The sheer number of past students poses a daunting challenge. The ISU Alumni Association counts over 250,000 living alumni alone.
Nor did we feel comfortable over-generalizing. An individual’s experience changes depending on their identity and when they attended school, which means that lumping everyone together into a single story would be untruthful. So, we compromised. 150 years divides neatly into five 30-year time spans, and we selected “spotlight” students to represent each of these 30-year spans, plus one current student to represent today. We attempted to include a range of majors, demographics, campus involvement, and life experiences. Unfortunately, we were somewhat limited by present archival holdings, which are weaker in certain departments and overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and male.
That said, we hope you will enjoy exploring the college adventures of Tom, Fan-Chi, Lorris, Vern, DeLores, Tracy, and Julissa. Taken together with the timeline, their stories highlight many of the ways students have experienced ISU.
Selecting events for the timeline
The timeline posed its own challenges. Every event in ISU history has somehow impacted student life, and students themselves have driven, or initiated, countless others. This meant that, in order to whittle the timeline down to a manageable size, we had to cut out a lot of interesting and relevant information. The result is a conglomeration of fun facts and historical sound-bites that are presented largely from a student perspective. We hope that every person who has attended Iowa State will be able to find something familiar in this exhibit, something that reminds them of their college days. But, if not, feel free to hit us up with your reminiscences!
Preserving your stories
Working with archives can sometimes be challenging. Often the materials that researchers want to use are not neatly packaged in discrete collections. Sometimes, relevant materials were never created, or else were never donated to us, in the first place. Many events occur without a physical record being left behind. Speeches are given with no recording equipment present and no transcript left to posterity. Modern digital files thought to be safe on hard drives are deleted or become corrupted. Whole segments of the population are simply ignored with only trace mentions in the “official” record. These gaps in archival holdings often represent a permanent loss in our knowledge and understanding of our community.
Working with archives can sometimes be challenging. Often the materials that researchers want to use are not neatly packaged in discrete collections. Sometimes, relevant materials were never created, or else were never donated to us, in the first place. Many events occur without a physical record being left behind. Speeches are given with no recording equipment present and no transcript left to posterity. Modern digital files thought to be safe on hard drives are deleted or become corrupted. Whole segments of the population are simply ignored with only trace mentions in the “official” record. These gaps in archival holdings often represent a permanent loss in our knowledge and understanding of our community.
The University Archives welcomes donations from Iowa State students and alumni. If you have materials that describe your experiences at Iowa State—and we realize that not all of these experiences will reflect positively on the University—please contact us. After all, as alumni and current and former students, you are part of ISU, too!