Spencer Stephens, Class of 1982
Spencer Stephens of Rockville, Maryland recently shared the following memories of his ECU experiences. If you have memories of ECU, ECC, ECTC or ECTTS please share them with us.
When I first began as an ECU student in 1978 at the age of 18, I reported to school ill-prepared for college. I had a drug and alcohol problem; I had come from a high school atmosphere where academics were not appropriately emphasized; I had never experienced the type of success that comes from hard work and concentrated effort. My expectations for my life were mediocre: I could not see that the future offered anything that would challenge or stimulate me. Nothing I had ever experienced ever had. My present was wrapped up in the maintenance a state of steady inebriation. My first student ID photograph -- taken in August 1978 -- shows an indifferent, aimless and pimply faced adolescent who was unsure why he was in Greenville and fairly sure that ECU held little for him.
But it took only one semester to learn that ECU was a fun and stimulating place. My professors talked of bold and unusual concepts, of strange foreign languages, of nearly magical devices called computers. They successfully fascinated me when nobody else really had. My classmates and dorm neighbors swilled beer and played cards into the wee hours and offered me close friendships unlike any I had ever had. I could see quickly that ECU was a community that I wanted to be a part of. When my disappointing first semester grades arrived in the mail in December, I could also see that I would have to work harder -- or the community which I found so warm and inviting would boot me out! And so I found, for the first time in my short and unhappy life, an important reason to be sober and to apply myself. With each passing semester, I learned just how rich it felt to learn and to grow. I learned how rewarding it was to strive for excellence -- and how awesome it was to push myself hard and to achieve so much.
My student i.d card expired shortly before the end of my senior year and I had to sit for another photograph. This picture, taken in May 1982, shows a confident, clean-cut and clear-eyed young man who had chosen a direction for his life. He had found that happiness is a byproduct of purpose and hard work. And he had found that the world offered him infinite riches if he would only find his goals, plan for them and devote himself to accomplishing them.
I felt then, as I do now, that ECU was an amazing place -- a community of creative and intelligent spirits, a town unto itself where each new face was a friend you hadn't yet met, where each classroom building was home to a different opportunity waiting to be explored. I also knew then that I owed ECU an infinite and enduring debt. My professors and my classmates had welcomed me, had taken an interest in me and had encouraged me in the right ways. They had helped and guided me to straighten out my life. Ever since, my life had been dramatically different and vastly more satisfying.
Some of my friends who have gone to other universities think my enthusiasm for my alma mater is so much foolish sentimentality. Well, it is sentimentality. But it's hardly foolish. ECU has earned every bit of loyalty that I feel.
May God bless East Carolina University. May ECU prosper and thrive to provide other students with the same blessings that it bestowed upon me.
