By Steve Stolder / Starbucks Newsroom
Every summer for 15 years, Raymond Smith has delivered what he calls “The Professor’s Perspective” to incoming Indiana University Bloomington students and their parents. He estimates 12,000 people have heard him give his talk about the perils of freshman year and the challenges that confront those who don’t make it through the fraught first months on campus.
The 64-year-old professor of literary studies draws on academic research, telling the hundreds who attend each lecture about a crucial time-to-degree variable – the less time you take, the more likely you are to graduate. And he reads “A Letter to Laura,” an unsent note he’d composed in the early 1990s, shortly after he came to Indiana. Addressed to his niece, the letter offers reminiscences from his own undergrad days, as well as four or five tested tips for surviving what he calls “the hottest of the flaming hoops that students jump through.”
“About once every other year, some parent in the question-and-answer period will ask, ‘What ever happened to Laura?’” Smith recalled. “And I’ll say, ‘Well, she really wasn’t in a position to take my advice.’”
