Skip to main content

What is the town like?

Face it: We’re not in Berkeley, California, or in Cleveland or Columbus. We’re not even in Mansfield. One student asked me where people go clubbing. My answer was “Umm … Burger King?” One of my Chinese students was astonished to see Amish buggies on Claremont Avenue. He thought someone was making a movie.

The trick here is to let Ashland be Ashland.

Doing stuff

The trick, as I said, is to let Ashland be Ashland and to expect to do some walking. Another trick is to grab a friend and get a spirit of exploration.

Ashland is a very safe place to walk, and there are a lot of shady old neighborhoods near campus. Just take a walk and look at houses from a bygone era.

Fire up Google Maps and find Brookside Park and Brookside Golf Course. If you’re a golfer, this course is within walking distance.

The Ashland County Fair will take place September 18-24. It’s about two miles away (just walk up Claremont Avenue away from town). Junk food! Animals! Rides! Country music! If you haven’t been to an Ohio County Fair, you owe it to yourself to go.

Several local churches are within a mile of campus, and they would welcome you. Some even have a potluck dinner afterward! (OK—it’s a bit scary to walk into a strange church alone, so take a friend.)

You don’t have to hide in your dorm room all weekend.

Buying things

We don’t have a bus system, and Walmart is about three miles away, so you should probably arrive with all the clothing you will need and a plan of being self-sufficient on shampoo and grooming aids. If you go away from town on Claremont Avenue, about a mile and a half from campus, you will find a big drug store and a supermarket (and also a pretty decent coffee house). If you go toward town on Claremont, there’s also the post office and a drug store along with several fast food places. Turn right on Main Street and you will find a couple of bike shops, a few restaurants, and several other small businesses.

(OK, the campus bookstore does have a lot of basic items such as shampoo, but it’s tiny, the selection is limited, and the prices are high. Besides, it’s more fun to get off campus from time to time.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Your Computer Ready for School

Back when I was a student, everyone packed up their portable typewriter for the move to campus. Lots of people got a new typewriter as a graduation gift, but I didn’t. I ended up using one we bought when I was in high school. The story is probably the same for you, except that it’s a computer, not a mechanical typewriter. Whether you just bought a new one or kept your old faithful companion with all of its stickers, you need to do a few things to get the machine ready for college. Getting Old Faithful ready for college Is Old Faithful sick? If the machine crashes a lot, has trouble (and takes a long time) doing things, or pops up weird ads to play poker or look at porn, you probably have a virus. (You just had to download that fancy screensaver, didn’t you?) Take a deep breath—bite the bullet—pay the computer repair shop to clean it up for you. Now that Old Faithful is feeling better … Back u...

Our Future Word Processors

The rumor from my secret sources is that Ashland University will soon make a transition away from Google Docs (and Google Drive, etc.) to a Microsoft product. Here are my early (and very personal) thoughts about the transition. Google Docs was always “word processing lite” Though it is getting better, Google Docs never gave much help with spelling or writing style, and its approach to page formatting was very primitive. Paragraph styles were especially weak. Docs was one of the first programs to automatically save your work, and that was a great advantage, but many other programs do that now. Its file format is unusual and hidden, so one result is that I keep getting files I cannot open from students who don’t really understand how it works. In general, Google Docs is OK if you are not too fussy about your final product, don’t want to learn how to use a better tool, and need something fast, free, and undemanding. I don’t think many businesses would use Google D...

How is College Different from High School?

I was going to put together a list of the differences between high school and college, but then I ran into a website which summarized things beautifully: How is College Different from High School? This website comes from California State University, Chico, a campus which is much larger than ours. As I look over their list, though, the only change I would make is the comment on class size: Here at Ashland, your class size is likely to be smaller than what you experienced in high school! The maximum class size for our course is only 15 students, which means that you really can ask a question and hope for an answer! (Though, of course, class sizes in other departments will be different from ours.) Two differences worth emphasizing Doing the reading In high school, you usually got the reading assignment, then were expected to go home and read it. Many students didn’t actually do that because the teacher would typically spend the next day telli...