Cramming All the News In Before We Cram All the Food In

In this Issue:

• Huge weekend for men’s and women’s soccer!
• Thanksgiving buffet for students staying on campus
• Luminaries!
• Reminder: spring tuition is due Dec. 1
• P’28s: Weekly Message and ’28s Letters So Dear
• Impressions of the Anderson Cooper student event

Happy short work week, Deac families! I know many of you are eagerly awaiting the arrival of your students; my ’27 is coming home tomorrow. Today I am sharing a wide variety of things before I head out for the Thanksgiving break on Weds. Let’s dig in!

Huge weekend for men’s and women’s soccer!

Congratulations are due to both our soccer teams:

For the third time in program history and first since 2011, the No. 2-seeded Wake Forest women’s soccer team has advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament with a 1-0 victory over No. 3-seed Ohio State Sunday afternoon at Spry Stadium. The Demon Deacons are now set to face No. 1-seeded USC in Los Angeles on Friday, November 29 at 5 p.m. ET. 

And our men’s soccer team earned a 2-1 victory over Maryland at Spry Stadium Sunday night. With the win, the Demon Deacons advanced to the Round of 16 for the 16th time in program history and will now host Clemson on Sunday at 6 p.m. ET.

GO DEACS!!!!!

Thanksgiving buffet for students staying on campus

The Wellbeing Center will host the Seventh Annual Thanksgiving Oriental Buffet from East China on Thursday, Nov. 28 at 11:30 a.m. in the Wellbeing Center Living Room. It’s free with your student ID. No RSVP necessary. This is a great option if your Deac is staying on campus! See all Thanksgiving hours of operation.

Luminaries!

If you take a look at the Quad Cam, you might be able to make out that there are tiny white boxes rimming the walkways. These are luminaries that are out for the holiday season. Be sure to check the Quad Cam at night – it will be very pretty.

Reminder: spring tuition is due Dec. 1

If you have not already paid your Deac’s spring tuition, this is your gentle reminder that it is due on Dec. 1. You can see payment methods here.

And if your Deac has not made you a third-party payer in Workday, it is to their advantage (and yours!) if they do so; see the jobaid.

P’28 Weekly Message and ’28s Letters So Dear and Life in The Forest

This Monday we bring P’28s a Weekly Message about gratitude. Your ’28s also received their weekly Letters So Dear and Life in The Forest.

Impressions of the Anderson Cooper student event

Last Thursday I attended the Anderson Cooper student event for Face to Face. I actually prefer the student events for a couple of reasons: they are inevitably more intimate in terms of the number of people present, and I also really like hearing what these illustrious speakers want to tell the next generation.

Anderson Cooper [my Internet Boyfriend, though he has no idea] did not disappoint. Here are my impressions of his student talk:

When he first took the stage, there was not only loud applause from the students, but they were actually whooping for him. It was such a joyous sound.

He struck me as extremely genuine, open, and transparent. One of the first questions right out of the gate had to do with professions he had envisioned doing when he was growing up, and his response was that some of the jobs he had wanted as a kid, ‘you couldn’t be gay for.’ As the mom of a student who is in the LGBTQ+ community, I appreciated his openness more than I can say.

He was also really interactive and playful with the audience. I was sitting way in the back but you could just tell watching his gestures (leaning in towards the audience like he was talking to you individually) and by telling the odd joke (‘shouldn’t you all be studying?‘ he asks them at the start) that he enjoys talking to people from all walks of life. He would ask the audience questions with a show of hands: ‘how many of you are seniors?’ ‘how many of you have lost someone close to you?’

He’s funny and knows how to deliver a line with maximum impact. He told a story of one of his early employers buying him the cheapest bulletproof vest on an assignment to a war zone (lots of chuckles). He steered clear of overtly political speech but dipped his toe in that pool by saying ‘there used to be a thing in this country called shame‘ (tons of laughter and some guffaws). And sometimes he was unintentionally funny: he started a sentence with ‘I was talking to Bill Gates‘ and the students’ responded with amazed laughter and it seemed to me in that moment he realized just how extraordinary his life is to others.

He understood the assignment, as did the student moderators (who were very good) in terms of sharing some of his wisdom and lessons learned with the audience – although he was quite self-effacing, or maybe the better word is imposter syndrome-y (sp?) about whether he was qualified to offer any lessons. Nevertheless, he had many pearls of wisdom to share.

He talked about the importance of trying many jobs after college and that even if you hate the first one, knowing what you don’t like is valuable data to have. He shared a story about having to leave a job for a time and come back later so that his employers could see him differently in a new role.

He talked about the very serious losses in his life – his dad at age 10, his brother as a senior in college, his mom several years ago – and how he spent a lot of time shoving that grief down and not dealing with it, but eventually you have to. It reminds me of something I say to my students when they are putting off dealing with emotions: you can pay now, or you can pay later, but either way you will have to pay.

He was very open about mental health, and being scared to be a senior and not knowing what to do professionally after graduation. I wanted to give him a big hug because this is such a needed message for our students. Hearing a successful, amazingly accomplished person say they didn’t have a clear job direction, or needed emotional support might just spur on one of our students seek help if they need it.

The through line of his remarks had a lot to do with survival and inspiration – what he survived, the importance of recognizing our own inner strength, and that we all have inside us what it takes to do what we need to do to succeed (in whatever measure you define ‘succeed’).

I got the strong sense that while today he was talking to students, tomorrow he’d likely be talking to world leaders or other significant people. But my gut tells me AC treats everyone with the same intellectual curiosity, respect, and dignity.

The real measure of success in any speech to students can be seen in two things: 1) how many of them leave the event early, and 2) how many are looking up at the speaker and not at their phones. I only saw a couple of students leave early, and none of them seemed to be looking at their phones. He had them all rapt at his words. Understandably.

Final impression: as previously confessed, I am an unabashed fangirl. The moment that hit me hardest was when he talked about how lonely an experience it was to go through his late mother’s boxes after she passed. Having done that myself – and having listened to his podcast, All There Is, after my mom’s passing – I felt a real kinship with him. (My handwritten notes said “Yes, I felt this too, IB!”).

Many thanks to the remarkable Mr. Cooper for sharing his time with our students, and to our wonderful Face to Face team for bringing such speakers to our campus!