Transferring to NC State
Cathy Sterling discusses transferring from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied music, to NC State.
Interview on 2010-10-21 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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As a high school student I had this fantastic music teacher, Mrs. Freeman,
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but she had a small group called the--.
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I can't remember the name of it but just a small group, maybe twenty singers maximum,
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and I auditioned for that, got into that,
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Tried out for a scholarship at UNC
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and got accepted for a scholarship
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and was among very few freshman women that were allowed at that time,
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and in the South you were still a girl, you know.
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And our curfew was 7:00. We had to be in the dorms, the doors were locked.
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Not even holding hands on campus. I mean those--.
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Like I said this was that transition. Within two years all these things--two or three years--these things were blown out of the water.
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And I fought it. I mean I was a very independent spirit,
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and I'm like, "But they--!" because the guys go by outside the windows going, "Nyah, nyah!"
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And I'm like, but they get to! So, but I didn't know music theory,
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and I look back and I think who in the world thought this was a good idea?
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Some day I'll write it up because it was the classic freshman experience of everything going wrong.
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So at some point I called my mom and I said, "I'm coming home," and she wisely got it.
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She didn't question me or challenge me. She was like, okay, so my voice must have been really awful.
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I came home, kind of recovered, and then came to State,
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and my SAT scores were terrible but they wanted girls so badly because they just had started this liberal arts program,
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and I can't remember the gentleman's name. He was there for many years in student financial aid.
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He was a great guy.
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He just really saw me through and the grants were generous back then, the scholarships and grants, what you got.
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It was the defense--. Later the initials were kept the same but they were basically defense loans because we were--.
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When Russia sent up the satellite suddenly it was about let's get people in colleges because we're just so far behind
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so all of this money was made available. So as I look at my children and go,
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it's not easy now, and they make this debt. I made virtually no debt out of college,
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just virtually no debt, and it was because of that.
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I got the grants and the loans and I was a female in the right place at the right time. [Laughs]
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So when I came onto campus there were very few. It was not uncommon I was in classes where I was the only girl in the room surrounded by guys,
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and it turned them to regular goofballs, I have to say.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.