Making the Grade

Smedes York remembers professors and academics at NC State.

Interview on 2012-03-15 00:00:00 -0400

Transcript

00:00:00.000 Having gone to Needham Broughton High School here
00:00:03.713 very well prepared. It is an excellent high school, it was an excellent high school at that time,
00:00:10.495 and so my freshman year wasn't a repeat
00:00:14.018 but it was something that built pretty steadily.
00:00:19.059 You can look at the transcript. I'm proud of the transcript. I only made two C's.
00:00:26.678 One of them was in electrical engineering, and I know the professor's name there was Smiley
00:00:32.433 and during the semester he would give us
00:00:38.353 difficult tests, but he had a system. The tests were open book
00:00:43.539 and then what you missed he would let you take it and work right and bring it back and he'd give you half credit,
00:00:53.443 and you could look at the old quizzes in preparation so a lot of it was not-. It was a difficult subject but you had all that to buoy you up.
00:01:06.224 So I got into the exam and he comes in and hands-. I don't know whether he had a bad night or what happened
00:01:11.925 but he handed out this exam and everybody just about died.
00:01:17.165 I mean we'd never seen this stuff before. [Laughs] When I handed the exam in I knew I had for sure an eight.
00:01:23.645 I think I ended up getting a forty-seven, which dropped me from an A-minus to a C-plus.
00:01:29.366 The other one was, I don't remember the teacher's name but it was in English composition.
00:01:33.361 I thought I had done pretty well in writing and all
00:01:39.421 but he gave me a C-plus and I wanted a B-minus.
00:01:43.720 I was an engineering student. So I went in there
00:01:47.406 and talked to him about maybe a B-minus and he started doing some of this well maybe-and I thought this guy's not an engineer. There's no chance.
00:01:55.256 So I forgot that. But I had a lot of really good professors.