Please click this link to the anonymous survey if you are a St. Louis Transplant (non-native, graduated from high school somewhere else) and you are willing to participate in my study about your experience as a newcomer to the area:   https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/stltransplantstudy

Friendly reminder: by commenting on my blog below, you understand that your comments are public and any information you provide is identifiable by anyone who reads this blog.

So, this week a story was written in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about my study on the effects the “where did you go to high school question” (and related cultural assumptions) has on the transplants of St. Louis. Not only did the story get the most comments of any story that day, I immediately started receiving emails and phone calls (not just at my office, but also on my personal cell phone…which was a little surprising) from people who wanted to weigh in on the issue.

While many of the comments on the P-D website, emails to me, and phone calls were from transplants expressing their disdain for the question, many comments have come from native St. Louisans trying to explain to me WHY we ask the question or telling me that the question is not wholly unique to St. Louis.

Now, I’m a polite person, so I don’t dismiss these people outright, but I see that I need to clarify something. I am not a historian. I am NOT studying WHY the question is asked in St. Louis. I know that it could be because we are a historically Catholic town; or a strongly unionized town; or that at some point in the middle of the last century we had a popular publication called “Prom” magazine that highlighted the trends and fashions at local high schools; or that we are prejudiced or cliquey; or that we are just friendly people making small talk. In fact, WHY it’s asked is irrelevant to me beyond the bit of background I’ll supply on the question in the introduction of my research report.

I am studying how this question makes transplants to the area FEEL. If I am studying how they are reacting to the question and how it shapes their opinion of our city and it’s natives– the intentions that people have when asking do. not. matter.

The people I’ll be interviewing and surveying will only be transplants. No natives trying to explain the history or functionality of the question. So, transplants, if you are reading this, it is YOU that I want to hear from, and it is only your opinions & perceptions that I care about.

Sorry St. Louis natives. I’ll let you talk proudly about the question & it’s history with each other. I do encourage all natives, however, to take a critical look at why they ask it (is it for judgmental reasons?) and then try hard to put yourself in a non-native person’s position. If you had no local high school to name, no shared points of reference, no friends in common, would you like to be asked this question as an ice breaker at a cocktail party or job interview? Probably not.

[This post has been modified to limit its effect on research participants' opinions in subsequent rounds of data collection.]

Recently I was awarded a grant from the Institute for Urban Research at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville to study an issue that has the potential to affect the reputation as well as the economic health of the St. Louis metro area.  The title of my study is Studying St. Louis’ “Where did you go to high school?” culture and its implications for non-natives, with a focus on economic and reputational effects.   I am currently looking for participants for the study.  Specifically, I need to interview non-native residents of St. Louis.  Please contact me if you are willing to take part in this study.  I am also seeking external grants/funding from local companies and organizations who realize how important it is to make our transplants feel welcome in our great city.  By commenting below, you understand that your comments are public and any information you provide is identifiable by anyone who reads this blog.  By publicly replying to my tweets or FB posts about this blog post or my study, you are forfeiting any confidentiality and making your answers and your name public.   If you wish to keep your answers confidential, please email me at svansle@siue.edu.

As a St. Louis native, I’ve never blinked at the question “Where did you go to high school?”  After living away for 10 years, I have moved back home as an outsider (a “transplant”).   My personal curiosity about the unique culture of St. Louis has led me to informally investigate the way other transplants feel about living in the Metro area.  It is through these anecdotes and conversations with non-natives that I began to wonder if St. Louis needed to take a critical look at our habit of asking that age-old question.  Asking “where did you go to high school?” tells natives a lot about a person’s socioeconomic level and friends, but it leaves the transplants I’ve talked with with a distorted opinion of St. Louis natives and our great city.

Already, there has been a recent development of groups that have risen up to counteract this issue.  One is St. Louis Transplants (http://www.stltransplants.com) and another is an LLC that it has partnered with called “Acclimate” (http://www.acclimatestl.com/) which describes itself as: “a high-touch personal network that creates a positive whole-life experience for new hires moving to St. Louis and their families; ensuring higher talent retention for employers.”  I’ve heard through my transplant grapevine that large STL corporations like AB and Scottrade have started to reach out to these new organizations to help them retain talent.

Through this research project, I hope to see an increase in transplants’ satisfaction with their social lives in St. Louis and improved opinions of St. Louis natives.  I hope to see an increase in St. Louis natives’ opinions of transplants and an increased feeling of social openness.

I’m a day late on my Thanksgiving post, and about 3 months late on a post in general, but I’ve been having some genuine feelings of gratitude this fall and I had to share.  I must start by saying that my life rocks.  My family and friends are amazing (my son being the shining star in the constellation of awesome people that make up that group) and living in St. Louis makes me happy every day. Some new feelings of joy have emerged, however, related to this great new professorial gig that I have at SIUE, and I can’t remember feeling this way about my career– ever. For the first time in my entire life (not just my professional academic career), I can say that I am grateful for being able and inspired to engage in research!  Yes, I am super stoked that I’ve had new ideas, new people to engage in interesting academic discussions with, and a whole lot of support from my university to encourage me to do research.  It makes me feel alive, curious, and energized, and I know I’m just getting started but I am excited by the long road of journal articles, late nights of writing, revise and resubmits (even rejections every now and again), and co-authorship prospects.  How lucky are we as academics to be able to think of a question that fascinates us, and then get paid to find the answer to that question?  We can learn something interesting every single day as part of our professional development, and get better at what we do as a result.  What an amazing life!  Be grateful friends and colleagues.  We are the lucky few.

It was a whirlwind final year for me at John Carroll University, but my 5th year there was my last.  Now that I’ve had a full month home in St. Louis, I can look back on my time there and reflect on a few of the things that make that beautiful Jesuit university so special, to me and to many others.

1. It’s commitment to service.  As a faculty member, I had many opportunities to serve the university and the community, including Cultivating Community Day, working with our Arrupe Scholars, and many immersion experiences.  The students, it seemed, had even more opportunities, with some given tremendous amounts of scholarship money if they committed to an academic career devoted to service (in whatever form that inspired them).

2.  Getting to know my students in small classes.  I loved knowing that on the first day of every semester, I would be welcomed to class by a room composed of many students with whom I was already familiar.  They were good kids, with good intentions, who had chosen me and my class again.  I knew their names, their career goals, where they worked, and who they were friends with.  Being so close to them made their graduation (and my eventual departure) all the more sad.

3.  The “legacy” students and their proud parents.  Now, some professors would say that proud parents can be problematic as they can be over-involved in their students’ lives.  My experience with those types of parents were rare. I did, however, get to advise pre-freshmen every year and have lunch with all of their parents, many of whom were JCU alumni. They were so proud that their children had chosen JCU and so excited to be with them and walk the halls with them.  A few of those students later majored in Communication and enrolled in my classes, and I always kept their parents in mind. I felt a special responsibility to live up to the high expectations (and fond memories) that their parents had for me and JCU.

4.  Faculty responsible for academic advising.  This is one aspect of my time at JCU that I both struggled with and thoroughly enjoyed.   While I had bad experiences with some advisees, it also allowed me to get to know many of the communication majors much better, and it allowed me to know the students in my classroom on a deeper level.  If an advisee of mine was also enrolled in my class, I had double the face-time with them and felt more and more like a facilitator of their education and growth than just a professor or just an advisor could.

5. The classic college campus feeling.  I remember watching movies about college when I was a child (some bad Rodney Dangerfield movie comes to mind), and in those movies, colleges all seemed like well-manicured gardens with some enormous ivy-covered neo-Gothic buildings scattered throughout and good looking students roaming the green spaces, talking about philosophy with books in their arms.  John Carroll is all of that (except most students are talking on their phones as they walk around campus and have snappy bags and well-worn backpacks to carry their books).  I never realized how few college campuses really felt that way until I left JCU and started looking around for new jobs.  It’s a beautiful place, and I will miss it.

The Administration Building at John Carroll University

In honor of my first Mother’s Day (a day late) and to mark the beginning of my first week at home with my son and my husband FULL TIME (!) I’m going to post some of my favorite pics of my baby boy during this, my first year with him in my life.  All the cliches in the world couldn’t accurately describe how  much I love him. He’s it. He’s my guy.

at 2 weeks old with “big sister” Lizzie

at 4 weeks old

Halloween. He was a scary skeleton! (OK, maybe not so scary)

Not happy with Santa.

7 months old. I love to watch him as he sleeps. Is that creepy?

9 months old. He LOVES driving the grocery cart.

He cries when we take him out of the stroller (he loves to be outside).

My big boy (10 months) and his buddy, Lizzie.

Fun fact about me: I am lactose intolerant.  I remember refusing to drink milk from a very young age (despite my parents’ best efforts).  Interestingly enough, though, I could eat frozen yogurt all day, every day.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.   My body would not like it, and I would have a hard time managing the stomach pain after a binge like the one just described, but I could do it, and live with the pain.  All for the love of froyo.

Which brings me to the greatest thing to happen to Des Peres, MO (where I now call home) since….well….the new golf and tennis store opened up.  Chill Frozen Yogurt has a new location on Manchester Road in Des Peres, and we paid our first visit on Sunday (first of many).  The decor is minimalistic (all white walls…so white, in fact, that it felt like we had walked in before construction was completed).  If it weren’t for the crowd of people already inside, I would have thought they weren’t officially open yet.  The back wall of the store is a froyo lover’s dream: self-serve soft-serve in 10-12 low fat and all-natural flavors. Flavors include: cheesecake, dark chocolate, cookies and cream, mint, cake batter, blood orange, and peanut butter.  I don’t gravitate towards the fruity flavors, but there were a number of them and they were the ones that tended to be the lowest in fat and “all natural” (makes sense).   I was VERY happy with my vanilla, cake batter, dark chocolate, cookies and cream mix, with crushed graham crackers and waffle cone bits on top.  Amazing.  All for around $5.50, which is what you’d spend on an equivalent amount of Ben & Jerry’s.  The great thing about the $5.50 you spend at Chill is that 10% of it will go to Friends of Kids with Cancer, a great cause. 

So treat your family to some froyo at Chill!  And coming soon next door to chill is a new Mosaic restaurant, which I cannot wait to review here on my blog.

I’ve counted down, moving through each week of work as a woman on a mission. My goal: to be a mom and wife who lives full time with her husband and son in her hometown of St. Louis, MO. According to my calculations, I have 15 more nights in Cleveland (not consecutive) standing between me and my goal.

I do have days where the daily grind does cause me to momentarily forget how far away I am from my son. There are also moments at night that are deeply sad and lonely. All I can do is cherish the time I have with him while at home, and try to make the most of my remaining time with friends and colleagues in Cleveland. I’ll certainly miss them when my time there is done.

I’m sitting at St. Louis Lambert airport waiting to depart for Cleveland and there’s a mom pacing with her crying infant nearby. I’m so grateful to have had so much time with my son when he was that little and also so happy that he will call St. Louis his hometown. This commute (all remaining 15 nights of it) was worth that.

Mardi Gras festivities in Soulard (St. Louis)

I’ve been living away from St. Louis for a number of years now, and I haven’t gone to Mardi Gras in St. Louis since I was in my early 20′s.  Asking my younger (cooler?) sister where and when my husband and I should celebrate Mardi Gras this weekend, she said she would be leaving mid-day on Saturday and we should just go to the “McGurk’s corner.”  Now, having been to John D. McGurk’s Irish Pub many times in my life, I knew exactly where she was talking about, but I actually had to google map it to see what the cross streets were.   For those not familiar with this great establishment, it’s at the corner of Russell and 12th in the Soulard District of south St. Louis city. 

I highly recommend these festivities to anyone, whether they go for the whole day or just a few hours at night.  The crowds will be insane, and I’ve been told that finding parking is impossible, so cabbing it is the way to go.  Still, find a friend to drop you off or get a cab, but add yourself to the mass of bodies that will be boozing and partying it up in Soulard this weekend.  Your participation is good for St. Louis, and you’ll have a blast!

If you want more information, here is the St. Louis Mardi Gras website (it’s a little sloppy, but it has all the necessary info): http://www.mardigrasinc.com/

To my dear CO 201 students, I understand where you are right now.  You are feeling somewhat confused, somewhat overwhelmed and perhaps a little angry at me, your professor, for making you write a literature review.  I am here to give you a list of tips that I have given countless students in years past while they were writing their lit reviews.  Read these tips, ask more questions, and, you never know, maybe your question will be added to this list for my next Research Methods class.

• please read the “How to write a lit review” website link that I have posted on blackboard
• include a title page, an abstract page, and then start the text on the 3^rd page.  Font for everything (including title and headings) should be 12 pt Times New Roman.
• do not use the article titles and authors as headings separating each article review.
• unless the title is critical to the study, do not cite the article title any where in the text of the lit review.  Article titles and journal titles only belong in the references section.
• the articles should transition seamlessly from one to the next.  You can and should cite more than one article per paragraph.
• you must list a references citation for any author that you mention in your lit review.
• do not use secondary sources.  Example:  “Smith (2004) cited Matthews (1997) who said that “communication between children of different ages is difficult”(Smith, 2004, p. 4).  No NO  NO!  Find the original work by Matthews (1997) and quote from that article or that book, and cite the ORIGINAL page number.
• always cite authors by last name only with the year (Matthews, 1997).
• you must cite by author once per paragraph.  If you are citing the same author throughout a paragraph, you can just give the name and year once, then cite page numbers the rest of the time.  Any time you begin a new paragraph, you must cite that author’s name and year again, though.
• If you are citing alternating authors in a paragraph, you must cite by name every time.
• if there are only two authors, you must always cite both last names once a paragraph.  If there are more than 2 authors, you must list all last names once in the whole essay, and the rest of the citations can be (first author, et al.).
• you MUST cite a page number if you are paraphrasing a quote from another source or if you are directly citing another source.  It should look like this:  (Hagedorn & Boyd, 1997, p. 5).
• commas and periods always go after the last parentheses.  For example:  According to Boyd (2005), people are bad communicators (p. 41).
• you must alphabetize your references list by last name.  If you have multiple entries from the same author, list the earliest work first.
• in your references, capitalize only the first letter of the first word of your article title or chapter title.  For Book and Journal titles, capitalize the first letter of every.
• Italicize the name of the book or periodical and volume number (if any).
• Conference papers presented should look like this:

Lanktree, C., & Briere, J. (1991, January).  Early data on Communication Apprehension in Children.  Paper presented at the meeting of the National Communication Association, San Diego, CA.