Lessons in Soul-Searching; Retreats Ease Way for Georgetown Freshmen; [FINAL Edition]

Brooke A. Masters. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Nov 29, 1992. pg. a.01

Copyright The Washington Post Company Nov 29, 1992

They thought they were signing up for a slumber party by the Chesapeake, a chance to make new friends and get away from their studies for a weekend. What the 81 Georgetown University freshmen got was 27 hours to stop - after racing for years on the track toward one of the nation's most prestigious colleges - and think about why they are at the school.

Sitting still is unnatural to most new Georgetown students, who spend their first three months diving into classes and extracurricular activities, rushing from libraries to keg parties and back. Each step of the way, they carry their parents' hopes and their own inflated expectations that college should be "the best four years" of their lives.

"They give themselves very, very little time to step back and ask themselves, `What is going to make me happy?' " said the Rev. William Watson, a Jesuit priest who devised the fall weekend retreat called Escape. "We needed a program for freshmen that would help them ask those kinds of questions" before they start applying themselves headlong to law school and medical school, he said.

Mason Couvillon, 18, from New Orleans, limped to Escape in a leg brace, the result of an intramural football injury. His first year has been difficult, he said. "I'm a long ways from home, and it's a lot more academically challenging than I ever expected. Then I blew out my knee."

He said Escape taught him that "everybody else is having problems {too}: bad grades, lonely, frustrated that it's been 2 1/2 months. It's been long enough, you ought to have good friends. . . . Even the people you see out with huge groups, they weren't happy either."

These are the high school superstars who suddenly find themselves ordinary - seven of every 10 Georgetown freshmen come from the top 10 percent of their senior classes. But they are not the only freshmen who need breathing space. Whether they are at top universities or their local community colleges, most first-year students find that they are unprepared in some way, academically or personally, for higher education.

Georgetown President Leo J. O'Donovan says he hopes to share Escape with other schools to help freshmen rebuild the self-confidence they lose in the face of homesickness, new social situations or unexpectedly difficult classes.

Like so many school trips, Escape begins with a long bus ride. Laden with sleeping bags and comfort food, the students piled onto three school buses on a November Friday for the 90-minute trip to Camp Letts, a YMCA campground between two Chesapeake tributaries south of Annapolis. Friends sat with friends, roommates with roommates, and their talk took on a competitive edge: Who had the most work, the worst professor, the best parties.

At the end of the line, Escape's director, the Rev. Patrick Conroy - a Jesuit priest known universally as Father Pat - explained what the escapees had gotten themselves into. "Take time in the busyness of school to look at what you are doing," he said, "to see if it is what you want to be doing."

Although Escape is nonreligious, it grows out of Georgetown's Catholic tradition. "Jesuit education is not designed to force you into a way of life imposed from the outside, but to help you discover in yourself what it is that gives you the most meaning, the most peace and the most joy," Conroy told the freshmen.

Some students nodded. Others shifted uncomfortably, wary of exploring the subject too deeply with people they had known only since August. Many acknowledged later that the trip came as they were beginning to wonder whether they would ever replicate their high school friendships and triumphs.

"I have friends I can go party with, but I haven't found a friend I can really talk to," said Stephen Bennett, 19, from Minneapolis. He arrived at the retreat "really skeptical. I wasn't really in the mood of going up to strangers."

Yet Escape, now in its second year, already has become a campus tradition: More than 520 freshmen, 40 percent of the class of 1996, will have taken one of the overnights by Thanksgiving. The majority are women, so the organizers spend the early fall recruiting men.

"Go and `share'? That sounds like a girl thing. It's not something that is done" by men, said Escape assistant director Frazier Holt, a 1991 Georgetown graduate. At the same time, she said, men who participate are more likely to return as upperclass leaders.

"I think this is such a rare opportunity for them, and they find a sense of support in it that they don't find in their guy friends. A lot of women can find the same level of sharing and support among their women friends," Holt said.

The sharing comes hard at first. Divided into small groups to discuss how they saw themselves when they arrived at Georgetown, this group said very little or rambled off on tangents.

"Our group was overwhelmed by the subject," said junior Matt Doherty, who led one of the groups. When the conversation flagged, he tried to get his eight freshmen to sit quietly and relax.

"Everybody started laughing," he said. "They said they aren't used to the silence."

Maybe it was the singing (Father Pat got out his guitar during a break) that did it. Maybe it was the candor of upperclass leaders who showed the freshmen how to begin to look inward and talk about what they found.

Junior Janine Gibson admitted that in her freshman year, "I met a lot of people whom I hastily put my trust in because I wanted to fit in. They weren't interested in who Janine Gibson was, only in going out and partying. Basically, the relationship lasted as long as a chug."

The second round of discussions took off.

"I've never seen people become so comfortable with one another so fast," said Amanda Brown, a sophomore leader. "People were putting themselves on the line and saying, `What am I doing here?' {and} `We've been here for 2 1/2 months and I'm still not connecting with anyone.' "

"Everyone broke down their walls," Couvillon said.

The next morning, they tore down another wall: the one that often divides students and administrators.

Robert Parker, dean of the business school, told the students how, as a 6-foot-5-inch sixth-grade klutz, he hid from the junior high school basketball coach. The man shamed him into coming in for special practices that eventually gave him the self-confidence he needed to win a basketball scholarship to Virginia Tech.

Even more impressive, from the students' point of view, was Parker's decision to leave his lucrative position at a New York consulting firm to take the dean's job at Georgetown.

"I said to heck with the money, to heck with the risk, I'm going to come down here and build the best international business school in the world - not for my own aggrandizement, but because I think it can make a difference for young people like you," Parker said.

"A lot of my friends are in the business school because they want to make a lot of money," said Drew McGowan, who plans to major in management. "It was great to hear the business school dean say, `Yes, I turned down X amount of money,' that people in business do have values."

Watson brings in faculty because he believes that students need to see that adults make choices and mistakes. "It gives {students} permission to think, `I don't have to get my life on track,' " Watson said. "It humanizes the learning environment."

The Escape planners also believe the program can change lives, but they could not have predicted its effect last year on Kevin Hicar, now 19 and a sophomore majoring in government and English.

Hicar's first semester at Georgetown was the stuff of nightmares. A 1991 graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, he arrived at the 11,500-student university unsure of himself.

"I didn't think I was good enough to go to Georgetown," he said. "I had a feeling I had been admitted because of my father," a Georgetown alumnus who works at the university hospital.

Isolated in a dorm without many other freshmen, Hicar made few friends and threw himself into schoolwork and swimming. In October, he came down with bronchitis and had to drop his calculus course. Then shoulder injuries knocked him off the swimming team.

As midterms approached, he was considering changing schools and badly wanted time away, but he didn't feel he could go home. "My parents said always, `Georgetown is the best school for you. You'll do fine,' and I was falling further and further behind," he said.

So he signed up for the retreat.

"I got to talk to people on a very personal level. By evening, I could say that the people I went on the Escape with knew me better than the people I had known for four months," Hicar said. "It provided me with the drive to go on."

After pulling down a 2.0 average on his midterms, Hicar finished the semester with nearly straight A's. "I still applied to the University of Virginia because I thought the Escape might be a brief respite . . . . {But} the people I met on Escape kept calling me and ended up being my best friends," he said.

Now, he said, even though his grades have dropped a little and he is not swimming, "I feel like I have gone from success in something to success in something else. I think I have the best friends in the world."

This year, Hicar is an Escape leader. "I'm in a position to help other people through the hard times. . . . I've stayed up many nights crying, wishing I was back in high school. Now I wouldn't leave Georgetown. There's a sense of community here, but you don't get it if you don't throw yourself into it."

By Saturday morning, the escapees were doing just that. More than 100 18- to 20-year-olds were square-dancing - even doing the polka. Not a single freshman sat on the sidelines as they swung from arm to arm and burst out laughing when the dance fell apart in confusion.

"Everyone let themselves get into it. You rarely see people that disarmed," said Susan Oetgen, 18, from Fort Washington.

"I've been so busy the last three months . . . I was going and going and going. It was great to come here and let loose," said Elaine Ziccardi, 18, a nursing student from Wilmington, Del.

Even the freshmen who were less susceptible to such abandon were grateful for the time to reflect.

"I thought I was going to meet a whole bunch of new people. That hasn't happened, but what I like more is that it made me analyze my social situation," said Bennett, who had eschewed a touch football game to sit by the fire. "When I go back, I'll be more conscious that I need a guy friend I can talk to."

"It helped me get things back into perspective, reminding me that I'm at college for my education, to broaden my mind," said Courtney Wilson, an English major from Ocean Springs, Miss. "I came to Washington for a reason, and it wasn't to drink."

Section:  

A SECTION

ISSN/ISBN:  

01908286

Text Word Count  

1939

Document URL: