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Hampden-Sydney College

Alumni Conversations: Brotherhood Through the Years

12 Files Each file contains the video recordings, transcripts, and metadata of all three conversations for a student.
From the Course Syllabus: On the occasion of the College's 250th anniversary, this course will foster conversations between past and present students about experiences at Hampden-Sydney. Through readings, guest lectures, and resources from the StoryCorps project, students will learn communications techniques related to interviewing, listening, and taking oral histories. Each student will be paired with an alumnus for a series of three conversations during the semester. The class will work to construct a series of conversation topics and questions that each student-alumni pair will explore together. The meetings with the alumni partner will constitute a recorded oral history using techniques and topics developed during the course. The class will also construct a public-facing project to report its findings about the College to a larger community in late April. Throughout the course, active learning exercises will give students the chance to set goals for conversations, and then to practice skills and techniques. Each activity will be followed by in- class reflection to critically examine the goals and expectations of the exercise. Students will use what they are learning to construct conversation prompts and goals for their meetings with alumni. Each alumni conversation will be followed by a written reflection that includes insights gained and ideas for the next meeting. Both formal and informal writing related to all active learning in the course will be kept in a field journal.
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Turney and Salyer, conversation 2

For our second conversation, we reflected on how Hampden-Sydney has cultivated an admirable culture of mentorship and brotherhood and how cultivating those ideals in young men remains paramount to forming good citizens. We reminisced on how our relationships with our mentors at Hampden-Sydney fostered leadership and accountability within us and gave us lifelong connections that we still rely on. We further discussed how we learned to become mentors and how we transitioned from mentees to mentors throughout our time on the hill, further emphasizing how these relationships are core parts of our college's culture. We then moved to institutional changes at the college that we have experienced as students, where we explored what it was like to be a student during the administrative transition to the leadership regime of President Stimpert. Griffin discussed how the change in presidents sparked numerous debates among students surrounding the college, its mission as an institution, and its future. We entertained questions such as the mission statement, the co-ed debate, and our long term sustainability as an institution. We concluded with a preface to our third conversation, which will seek to examine the history of the college and how it might shape its future.
  1. Elias Turney and Griffin Salyer

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