Anne Palmer and Ella Peterson

00:03 I'm an Elizabeth Palmer. I'm 54 years old. It's October 20th, 2016. And where in Chicago Illinois. I'm here today with my daughter and I am her mother. I'm Ella Peterson. I'm 16. It is October 20th 2016. We are in Chicago, Illinois, and I'm here with my mother.

00:31 Okay, so I was thinking of asking you about your college experience and school in general or in general just because that's what I'm undergoing right now. So how did you decide on going to the school that you did for college undergrad?

00:53 When I was about your age, I was starting to think about looking at different colleges and universities. And first of all, I had visited

01:03 Probably about a dozen because of going to debate tournaments around the West for the most part so that got me interested in thinking about leaving Salt Lake City and maybe trying another University and somewhere in that process. I started to think about possibly going to the Pacific Northwest. Although I didn't know what universities were there and my whole family went to see a King Tut exhibit in Seattle and I really like to Seattle. So I did a very little bit of research and I told my parents that I might want to go to Seattle University and they thought that was silly because Seattle University didn't have them big reputation and it was in Seattle.

01:53 And then of course, I had my friends from the Episcopal church group who are a little bit older that were also exploring college is one went to USC and his brother whom I really really liked a lot went to Stanford's. So I thought Stanford seems like it'd be a wonderful place to go but I

02:18 Knew that my parents would probably not. Let me go without them approving it. So we set up a college trip to visit the Bay Area of San Francisco and

02:31 Somewhere along the line decided to visit the University of California Berkeley as well as Stanford.

02:37 And when we got to Berkeley, I went into the admissions office and met with somebody who

02:46 Essentially blew me off and their attitude was why are you wasting our time if you don't live in the state of California, you'll never get into college here. So I really like that kind of Challenge and wanted to prove her wrong and my mom and dad took me to Spenger's Fish Grotto for for lunch afterwards. We all had a really great time and my parents were super happy and at that point I was

03:16 Probably your age. I don't know if this was junior year or senior year might be in the fall my senior year and kind of was focusing mostly on those two schools and about that time. My parents said that I couldn't go east of Utah. So I was limited to a few states in the Western United States. Okay, it sounds like so I guess my grandparents but your parents pretty restrictive about it where they worried about money. Was there a reason why they want to do so close or they had to have approval of college. Was it like that growing up your entire life or was it just specific College? Was it really important to them?

04:00 Well great questions. I think that my mother probably had some regrets because she had been admitted to

04:10 I think Cornell University and chose not to go and that's where her mother went. So that might have played something into it. My dad of course had been to the University of Utah for undergraduate in law school. Hadn't been outside the state predication.

04:30 I do think there was some Financial concerns about having to buy an airplane ticket outside of the region that is easy to get to but at that age, I didn't ask my parents why they had decisions or argue with them once a decision was made I accepted it.

04:50 Interesting. So it seems like nowadays. I don't need to seek approval to go to a college so much you guys mostly just want what's best for me or wherever I seem to be butting in the best. Have you seen a different in the way the difference between how I was raised and you are raised just the dynamic between parents and children seems like we're pretty informal about a lot of things and it seems like there is just like a different relationship between for instance like you and your father and then my father and I are me and you so

05:32 I think a lot of that comes from us living in a much more information Centric age where information about colleges and universities. What can and can't be possible is very accessible. Unfortunately people talk about it a lot more in starting at earlier ages talk about it a lot more than in my generation and I think the third factor is that

06:05 With me being a working parent whereas my mother was not a working parent. I

06:13 Focus more on

06:17 Making you happy when I have a chance to be around you and I think giving you a chance to explore and be the person that you want to be is his part of that but I also work in higher education. So my mind is open a lot more to education in general and I find it so rewarding and I hope you will too. Unfortunately, there's a house. There are more. Yeah information about colleges and some more pressured and wouldn't you want to elaborate on that white I would think that more information would be better.

06:53 You can make a more informed decision. I just don't think I don't think children my of my age made a list of 20 different colleges. They would think about applying to maybe if they were coming from a prep school. They wouldn't be aware. They would be aware of 20 colleges. But like I said, I would kind of interested in the Pacific Northwest. And since I was in the city of Seattle, I must have seen a sign on a bus that said Seattle University or maybe the exhibition of the King Tut was near Seattle University, but there really was I guess I could have checked out a book from the library that listed a bunch of colleges, but we just didn't have the internet. So so you end up going right? What was what are you super scared and nervous on your first day. I'm already nervous and I don't even know where I'm going. So

07:48 I don't really recall ever being scared and nervous.

07:56 It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't frightening. I felt confident and then again maybe going to those other colleges for pre.

08:06 College Programs which word debate camps and Clinics prepared me for what it was like to be in a dorm to have a roommate to get myself up to be in charge of a key to get in and out. But I I didn't find it frightening. I guess I would be more nervous about finding my place finding the people. I wanted to be with or figuring out my major what I was interested in how I wanted to surround myself because now especially if you went from parents that were pretty restrictive or you know, helicopter parents, I guess going to being able to basically choose everything. That's a huge change. How did that affect you? Wait? Did you just call me a helicopter parent now your parents?

09:02 I don't know is I just don't see education as being restrictive or scary eyes. I tried a whole lot of different things. I took a

09:11 Interest survey believe after I had been accepted at Cal and they had a program where they placed students. I think that it was primarily for out-of-state students into a little cohort and we met with a professor and I was placed with Professor Bob Middlekauff in the history group. So I had a professor that I met with for lunch with a group of people and I remember there was one woman that I transferred to cow from Barnyard and I thought where in the world is Barnard college that so exotic. It's in New York. I don't know anyone from New York. So that was really helpful and I think colleges do a lot to put you together with other people. So you're not alone and Mike Enos choices about your schedule and your major.

10:03 Also going back to deciding on colleges if your parents hadn't restricted you from going to the east of Utah. Where would you have gone if you had gone been able to go anywhere?

10:19 You know, I didn't I wasn't even aware of it at the time. But since then I have thought that the cooper-hewitt Union in New York a design school or a school like the new school in New York would have been really good for me because I think I started out as a really creative person and then I lost some of my creativity and became a more practically oriented person through my education and and and probably part of it was through not feeling extremely confident in things that I tried like economics and political Theory.

11:03 Although that that that came back around later you think part of the reason why you felt that you were kind of losing that creativity was also just the process of growing up a lot of especially like I remember I read The Little Prince when I was growing up and they lose their creativity as they get older and the dream is to keep that do you think part of growing up is just facing the real hard times that life brings. I think it's more bread out of us in the education system. I just recently saw some statistics about levels of creativity in 5 year olds and and in 25 year olds, and it's largely attributed to the fear of failure.

11:50 What are the bad thing?

11:52 Okay, so going back to college so I know you after college you've switched around to a lot of different jobs and done a lot of different things. What did you think you were going to be going into college and study?

12:09 I had no idea what I would study and oh, I take that back. I I didn't know what would be my undergraduate major, but I was fully prepared to go to law school and there again some

12:29 Very persuasive advice on my parents part caused me.

12:35 That was one of the factors that cause me not to pursue Law School.

12:40 And then after college

12:44 What led to you changing a bunch of different Pathways. Do you think it was being in college? Not exactly sure what you're going to do after that or what made you so that you were versatile enough on your part to change that much. But also, why did you change that? I think it would have been really boring to do one thing for a long time. And so I generally change when I feel like I have mastered something and I I do know that I tend to like to start things but not necessarily nurture them into maturity. I'd rather start something and then turn it over to somebody else. So

13:29 I I didn't find this the the career that I started in in journalism to be very fulfilling because I learned almost everything that I thought I could learn really quickly. There's asking questions there's gathering information and then there's synthesizing it and putting it on a page for people to read on a newspaper that the next day is going to get recycled or, you know even worse put on the bottom of a parakeet cage. So I unfortunately didn't last in that career more than 8 years, but I use the same skills from it in every other job that I've had so when you got to college, what was your best experience? What do you say?

14:20 4 best memory I have so many best memories but learning about Modern Art through the art history program was probably the most enlightening.

14:38 Uplifting long lasting and rewarding aspect of what I studied and that's part of why we're here in Chicago today. And this week is the Art Institute of Chicago. I'm just very stimulated by the visual arts.

14:58 Selfie, number one and

15:01 Second would be

15:06 First time being around a big city for much time San Francisco being a lot larger city than Salt Lake City and I loved being able to go to the theater go to different kinds of restaurants. Go on a boat out in the San Francisco Bay things that you just couldn't do in sitting by the mountains. Yeah, so I know you joined a sorority what were sororities like back then cuz D, I was telling you about them. She just kept on saying that they're just so much different from how they are. Now. Was there a big difference now, it seems like a lot of times there's some events and there's a lot of partying is definitely my impression of sororities and fraternities. Now, what was your experience at that like college? Well, they're definitely were a lot of parties. I think there is a large.

16:06 Dimension of a commitment to leadership and to managing a system of living together that has rules where the girls are in charge of making or enforcing rules or rules that have been passed down through Traditions. So we had you have a lot of officers and for me it was a lot like being in job's daughters, which I had done as a teenager. So that's from the Masonic organization for for women. And so I was the chair of the scholarship committee. So I was in charge of making sure that if somebody was getting D's or sees that she was doing study hours in the house and maybe be encouraged to

16:56 Choose classes that were better suited to her strengths. So I did a lot of coaching in in my sorority and I did a ton of learning from the older girls to one of one of the formative experiences was learning about what is a cough coffee latte. I've never seen one of those in my life and older sister sat down by me in an art history lecture with this big coffee. And I said, what is that? And she said it's a lot a silly and it and I said, where's get it and she said Cafe Roma how much was that? And she said a dollar twenty-five and I said you spent a dollar twenty-five on coffee everyday and she just looked at me like why are you even asking a question about pad?

17:47 Okay, that's pretty funny.

17:52 Okay, so going I guess the total opposite of bass. What was one of the worst experiences in college embarrassing or you failed or you along those lines?

18:08 Well when you say worse, the worst thing that ever happened to me was I was studying in a

18:14 Carol, which is a little desk in the stacks of the library and I was resetting back and reading and I had my feet up on the desk and I looked down and there was a man who had crawled underneath the desk and was looking up at me and looking up my dress and I screamed bloody murder and I ran and it was just like a nightmare. It was stuff that I ran to the end of the hall and up some stairs and there was like chained locked area and I was just banging on metal thing just screaming and obviously it was very very very upsetting and we contacted the police and he had been doing the same thing to other women and they they ended up arresting him and I had to go and look at a police lineup of people and

19:13 It turned out that he was a veterinary technician at the University. So somebody will who work there and it was a horrible thing cuz I love being in the library and I've worked in the library and then I became so scary for me.

19:29 Okay.

19:33 Interesting. So after that to do I have any trust issues with men that sounds pretty scarring or pretty I guess just shaking. Well, it certainly made me a lot more cautious of my surroundings and definitely less trusting of places that I felt. We're safe places on campus and I think that's an important issue for women and one of the things that we will not just women that for four people on campus and anyone can be vulnerable. That's why today as we were touring and people were talking about how close those emergency siren Pavilions are is is really important. I did, you know, I had to decide whether to tell my parents about it or not, and I did and they

20:21 I kind of used it as a reason to convince me to come home. I took the winter off that winter and that's when I worked up at 2 Valley Lodge and worked in sales and marketing and and kind of took took a little extra semester off from college and that ended up being a really fun time for me, but

20:43 You know, I would have been just as good to plow through and finish. I still finish on time cuz I had AP credits so

20:52 Okay. So you're talking about on the college campuses I know rape is a really big issue. Was it as big of an issue back then and it just wasn't publicized it or spoken about or there just wasn't as much drinking or reasons. That woman would be in a state that it is easier to take advantage or anyone.

21:19 I can't say that I was fully aware or informed about the prevalence of sexual predatory behavior and date rape when I was in college. I do know that.