Nicole Meyer ’16 showed up in my doorway this week and introduced herself as my new colleague. She has a student worker position in the admission office down the corridor, but what she really wanted to tell me was that she had learned how to do her laundry.
Nicole reminded me that we met once before, on the day of her Convocation. Stef Trinkl ’14 and I had picked up our reporters’ notebooks and headed on out to collar members of the brand new class of 2016. We wanted to ask them about their dreams for the next four years. 
It turned into Big Dreams (an article that resonated with not a few readers who remembered their own first days at college.)
Anyway, back to Nicole’s laundry. At the time, her dream (“My dream is to find a friend who can do my laundry for me!”) struck me as first, well, funny – and also as great copy. Second, I thought she must be a remarkably well-thought-out young woman – a natural delegator whose mind was on the higher things of life. Nothing could be farther from the truth, says Nicole. She just didn’t know how. But now, she not only does her own laundry with confidence, she does her friends’, too. Everything is fresh and fluffed, neatly folded, socks nicely paired … grown up and gone to college!
By the way, searching on www.snc.edu for this article proved a humbling experience. Typically, a St. Norbert College Magazine article on any search term shows up high on the list – usually at #1 or #2. Not so if the keyword you’re searching for is “laundry”! Big Dreams didn’t show up until page 4 – pages 1-3 being filled with results from Res Life about where the washing machines are, what they cost and how to use them.
Reminds me of the time I toured a University of Wisconsin campus with my 16-year-old twins. The student tour guide took us and a couple of other families through a res hall, with obligatory stop at the laundry room. She asked the kids how many could do their own laundry. My two were the only two prospective students who raised their hands (doing your own laundry being obligatory from sixth-grade up at our house). They rolled their eyes at me. Uh-oh, I thought. I’m for it now. (“Mo-o-m, we told you, nobody else’s mom makes them do chores … .) We got back to the car and they couldn’t wait to … thank me. Beautiful parenting moment, I’ll never forget it.
In other news … turns out from my Google search that we have written about laundry quite a bit for a magazine dedicated to linking “the institution’s past and present by chronicling its academic, cultural, spiritual and co-curricular life.” Reason #18 from 32 Reasons Why It’s Good to Be Here was LaundryView, the monitoring system that texts you when a specified washer or dryer is free.
And here’s one of my favorite quotes ever from our magazine, from Holly Nickerson Likes St. Norbert College. Here’s Holly, posting on Facebook during her first week as a college student:
I’m doing college laundry … as in, clothes I wore in college are being laundered in a college washing machine, drying in a college dryer … and then folded by my college hands 😀
Don’t you love it! And Holly, too, has since become a colleague: When she returns from her semester abroad in Manchester, England, she’ll resume her own student-worker position in our building.
