Rhodes College

I first learned about Rhodes College at a Colleges That Change Lives college fair right here in North Carolina. I read about it in the Colleges That Change Lives book and then I visited and applied.

Rhodes College is a small liberal arts institution located in an urban area. The campus is a well-organized, gated Gothic campus, and visually, the college is great. The authentic stone buildings adhere to an architectural code and the planners have done a great job with the campus. However, as I frequently remind myself, a beautiful campus does not a good college make. Other reasons I chose Rhodes include:

Pros

• Location in the Memphis area, which provides:
• Music
• Culture
• Theatre (more on this later)
• Opportunities for internships in pretty much any area
• A waterfront, albeit a pretty ugly one, but I like cities with waterfronts, and of course
• Barbeque.
• They gave me a wad of cash. These people have a lot of money to throw around.
• As a liberal arts college, it has a fairly even balance of academic studies. Certainly, some departments are more challenging than others (I've heard stories about Biology and Economics), but I feel all of them have something to offer me.
• Rhodes strongly emphasizes professor-student contacts, which are a great way to elucidate and encourage learning. The closer my relationship with my instructor, the more I'm be able to get help and really apply myself.
• We have a theatre department. As I began to look at colleges, I realized that my requirements in this area would have to be pretty loose, since there aren't very many superbly-equipped liberal arts colleges with less than 2000 students (my body of college search) in terms of physical performance space and production equipment. And so I realized that I'll almost certainly scale down coming out of Hanes Theatre. This saddens me.
• They built this gihugeous new library there that opened just this year for us freshmen. It's big and bad. As in badass.
• There's a neato sundial on the side of a building.
• First college I've encountered where, like at home, it's free to do laundry.
• Really pretty stained-glass windows everywhere.
• I can call myself a Rhodes scholar. Probably after about 100 times I'll even be able to do it with a straight face.
• Neato astronomical observatory with a big telescope and everything.
• Mega-awesome work study in the Theatre.
• Most of the people I've met are really nice people.

Of course, all schools have things that aren't quite so great, too. The things that annoy me about Rhodes are as follows:

Cons

• 51% of students are involved in fraternities or sororities.
• The theatre space is...intimate, a certain step down from Hanes Theatre. It's a black box with rearrangable seating and no movable rigging system. They have no standard proscenium theatre. However, there is hope. See below.
• The food is hit or miss. The cafeteria used to be called the "Rat Factory" informally (or "affectionately" if you believe the tour guide). It retains the appelation "the Rat" and this is overwhelmingly how it is referred to on campus.
• No bowling alley? What does my tuition pay for?
• No true indoor pool, although there kind of is. Ah, who'm I kidding? I'm only going to use the pool like once a year anyway.
• Um...were you reading before when I said that 51% of students are involved in fraternities or sororities?
• The dorms aren't very homey. Tile floors, cinder-block walls...it feels very institutional. At least we have a suite bathroom.

But all around, it's a great school for me. Now, at several places in there, I said I'd talk more about theatre. I'm going to do that now.

Theatre at Rhodes

Yes, I can participate in theatre without being a major. Of course, that makes sense in a liberal arts college, doesn't it? Anyway, there's all sorts of other cool things about Rhodes.

The McCoy Theatre is an intimate space with no movable linesets. The scene shop is accessed through large doors at the back of the stage. It is about on parallel with the Hanes Theatre scene shop, except it has a little more floor space. And that's good for assembling set pieces.

The dimmer room, from what I can tell, doubles as the sound booth, which is imperfect because the sound technician, then, has no idea exactly what the audience is hearing, because he is up at the top left corner of what would be the proscenium. There is a patch bay, although I'm told the system will be dimmer-per-circuit soon. They have already switched over from their old, crappy Altman equipment. It all lives underneath the audience seating sections. Hanging from the grid are some sparkling ETC Source Fours and a few Strand Fresnels for washlight. The house lights are nondimmed PAR floodlamps. This means that, as far as I can tell, there are only two modes for the house lights: on and off. I might be wrong about that, though. I hope that I am.

I learned on my April visit that there have been recent experiments in cooperation between Rhodes College and the much-larger University of Memphis. UM has a far better-equipped theatre with several drool-worthy pieces of equipment (read: color-scrollers [I've always wanted to just get my hands on one] and intelligent lights). They seem to have more resources, too, as they managed to build a pool into their theatre for Metamorphoses, a feat which a Rhodes student told me Rhodes could never accomplish. And so there is serious potential for me to work with a real, actual, well-equipped theatre while still receiving my education at a small liberal arts college.

There is no real musical theatre at Rhodes, and it doesn't seem to me that there is very much musical theatre at UM either. I am certainly correct on the former point, but I may be mistaken on the latter. I mention this because musical theatre, or more specifically good musical theatre, nourishes my very being.

In Closing