During move-in week ’19, we asked UI faculty members to tell us a story about their own experience of leaving home for the first time. Here’s Cornell grad Laurie Hogin, who joined the faculty here in 1997 and has risen through the ranks — to chair of the Painting and Sculpture Program and associate director of the School of Art and Design.
“I remember arriving at Cornell in a state of mild, disoriented apprehension and profound excitement — feelings I imagine are near-universal among freshmen.
“However, I was delighted that my request for a North Campus dorm had been granted by the housing lottery, since that was at the top of the notorious Hill, and the alternative, called ‘U-Halls,’ were at the bottom. I’d been warned that U-Hall living meant that I’d remember my first year at Cornell as walking up a 30 percent slope in 10-degree weather to get 20 percent on an examination.
“Then, my luck got even better — my room in Low Rise Number 10 was famous; the envy of the neighborhood, with a giant mural of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ prism design. But when I met my roommate, Pam, I began to wonder whether my luck had compounded, or turned — she was, undeniably, an elegant, glamorous and stunningly good-looking person.
“Would her beauty attract guys like moths to a flame, leaving my cute, but hardly glamorous, little punk-rock self sitting in the dark, or would she generate a surplus? And if she did make it rain men, would they be guitar hero-types, or football hero-types?
“Such were the thoughts running around my 18-year-old brain.
“As it turned out, my questions were moot. Both of us became very committed and involved students. Our respective academic programs provided social circles based on new interests as we each began to outgrow our adolescent identities.
"But Pam never lost her elegant sense of style, and her example turned out to be a lovely part of my first-year education.”
