Perseverantia: Fitchburg State University Podcast Network

FITCHBURG YOUR STORY: Fly Like a Falcon - Timothy Dewey

Fitchburg State University Season 4 Episode 2

In “To Fly Like a Falcon," Timothy Dewey, a senior at Fitchburg State University, reflects on his college experiences and asks some questions on what it means to be a Falcon. Listen along as he talks about his personal experiences and research into the FSU student, how times have changed, and what he found to be important about his college experience.

Written and narrated by Timothy Dewey, a Math major with minors in Psychological Science and Middle and Secondary Education (5-12), this is the next episode in a series called Fitchburg Your Story, which will be published throughout the month. 

Episodes in this series were produced and edited by the students in Professor Kisha Tracy's Storytelling and the Oral Tradition course (ENGL 2890) in the Spring 2025 semester.  

"Saxifrage"  is the Fitchburg Your Story theme music.  Music by Prof. Robin Dinda, Text by Prof. DeMisty Bellinger-Delfeld.  Performed by Fitchburg State University Choirs with Alanna Rantala (piano) and Prof. Jonathan Harvey (conductor).

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Episode transcript here.

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Additional mixing and mastering by members of the Perseverantia staff.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia. Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

[ “Saxifrage” choral music plays, performed by the Fitchburg State University Choirs ] 

Prof. Kisha Tracy (intro): Welcome to the Fitchburg State University Perseverantia Podcast network. This is the Fitchburg Your Story series in which Fitchburg State students tell the stories that make our city and university unique.

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Tim Dewey: This is Timothy Dewey, and this is my podcast, To Fly Like a Falcon.

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To the listeners, I have a question for you. Why are you thinking about going to or did you go to college? That's a loaded question I know and it can lead to an overwhelming number of answers. I bring it up because I ask myself the same question for a long time. And honestly, I still do. I often wonder, am I making the right choice here?

Maybe some of you listeners had the same thought too. Or maybe you're some of lucky few who know exactly what they're gonna do with your life. And I sincerely jealous of you.

For me, during the spring semester of 2025, I made the decision to pursue becoming a high school math teacher. That choice added another year to my graduation. And the iconic part, I'm still not entirely sure if teaching is what I wanna do. As of now, I'm a math major with a double minor in psychology and secondary education. I’ve always enjoyed helping others learn. That moment when something just clicks is so satisfying. But even with that, I sometimes question whether I'm really fit to be a teacher at all. The uncertainty is part of what led me to a storytelling class and ultimately to this podcast. So back to that question, why college?

How many of you said, for the experience, and I mean the college experience? Or maybe you came here because you wanted to live in Fitchburg. Maybe you picked the affordable or convenient option. Or maybe you're here simply to get a degree. These are the kind of things I'm curious about. I mean, I've lived here for 23 years and almost all of those things apply to me. It's convenient, it's cheap, and I'm here for a degree. Or at least I was.

When I started working on this project, I kept circling back to a bigger question. What does it mean to be a Falcon? What is school spirit? Is it something we ever truly had? This semester, I wanted to connect with FSU more. I went to events, attended presentations for potential math faculty, talked with students both new and familiar and even did a little research into FSU's history. I want to understand what it meant being a Falcon and maybe share something you can take with you into your next class or semester. So where do we begin? I think it starts with looking at Fitchburg itself and the past of FSU.

In my research I spoke with Asher Jackson, the director of the archives at FSU, and he pointed me to a key moment in history before 1968. Around that time, people's experiences of college started to political climate was changing, ietnam War, and cases like Antonelli vs Hammond kind of changed how people viewed their college days from that point forward, so I thought it'd be better to kind of like look into that general area beforehand to kind of get an unbiased view on that. So first, let's figure out what school spirit is.

I'll be honest, I haven't gone to many games or pep rallies. I wasn't even aware of anywhere happening while making this podcast. Kind of the hard part of being a commuter.

So I started thinking about school spirit not in terms of sports or events, but as kind of culture community. There are two definitions I'll be thinking about when consulting this idea about culture or community.

There's the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which defines heritage, but you know, it's here as well, as legacy or tangible and intangible attributes inherited from past generations maintained in the present and passed into the future.

And for the second definition, I decided to kind of look into a psychology book of mine. It's called Human Relationships by Vivian McCann. And in this book, culture is defined as a set of values shared by a group of people, which shape and influence the norms, attitudes, beliefs, expectations, perceptions, and behaviors of the group members.

This puts us in a good spot to take a look at some aspects of what we call Fitchburg or FSU spirit. There are two interesting tidbits of information that interested me when I kind of thought about this question. Like, do you know why the Boulder is where it is?

It wasn't always top of Main Street at that little roundabout know like they blew it up and put it back together, right? It used to be in a place people would gather and they sit on top hill called Rollstone Hill. Do people talk about why?

It's kind of like when giving directions like, yeah, bank a left at the boulder, go to the right of the boulder. It's not really anything like people hang out around anymore. It's kind of like lost its purpose. I mean, hell, like in front of my girlfriend's house, there's a piece of the boulder literally recognized by itself. Or there's this other tidbit.

How about the fact that Freddy the Falcon wasn't always our mascot? I mean, intuitively, yeah. All places gotta start somewhere, not everybody has a mascot, but it wasn't until 1968 when I found a newspaper from March 6th of that year, where it that kind of first declaration of not only the school colors of green and white, I think gold came at a later time, but… It was the Falcon, which was our sports team's mascot, began being officially recognized or voted in at this time to be the school mascot. And these are just some of the few stories that kind of made me think a little bit more about this city that I'm in or this college that I'm in. Kind of made me realize that like maybe I haven't been looking at where we are.

So one of the things I want to understand was how the city of Fitchburg and Fitchburg State College has interacted over the years. The physical environment of our campus plays a big role with how students connect or don't. Like, back in the day, campus used to rely on a trolley that would bring students to and from the railway or even downtown. Or even before the rec center existed, students would travel to Whalom for swimming lessons. And I think we have to do that now because our pool's closed. Today, while there are more shops opening downtown, it still doesn't feel like there's much to do there.

And when there's not much to do, it's easy for students to stay in their room rather than seek out that connection. That's why I really appreciate the effort FSU makes with events, rallies, sports events, even live podcast recordings. 

To put in perspective, back in 1904, the school catalog described kind of residential area of Miller Hall. It used to have only 48 rooms for students. Now, to be fair, when it was built it was only for women, but then they built a second - we have just Russell Tower being one building. It has more students. That's roughly seven and a half Miller halls.

I kind of wanted to take some things that I saw from the life of Miller Hall and kind of understand what the people of Russell Tower are like or even just like a perspective of it from an RA, which I talked to Elizabeth on RA at Russell Tower and she said this about it.

They always try their best to get students to come out of their rooms and take part in dorm-wide events to get them to mingle and have some fun. We always try to foster community the best that we can. And...

I mean it speaks to it, the environment we're in shapes how we interact and when you feel like just another face in the crowd it's hard to feel that personal attachment. mean there's almost, there's 449 other students in this building like how am I even supposed to know them when I don't even know the rest on the same floor? Well here's the thing, not everything is out of our control. Sure we can't fix the roads or magically open a bunch of cool spots downtown, but students still have the power to shape their experiences. Towards the end of the semester, I had realization I'd been looking in the wrong places for these answers. I had mostly been in large general education classes with a mix of majors, but then I attended a presentation for a math department hire. And suddenly, I was in a room full of future teachers. Students mainly focused in like the first to fifth grade at the education aspect. The presenter asked the room about their experiences at FSU and most gave the familiar answers like, I'm here because it's cheap, I'm here because I've lived here my entire life, I've lived here because I'm here for a degree. But one student said something that I wasn't expecting to hear.

And she said, since we're all in the same major, we've been together through all of our classes. It feels like we're one big family. And then that's when it clicked for me. It seems very simple. And honestly, you've probably heard it too. When people say school spirit doesn't come from the school itself, it comes from the students. Which, yeah. But...

When you're a student yourself and you're doing that day to day, you don't really get the chance to just kind of sit with that, where it's like, oh, great, I have to go home study for the next midterm, everything like that. The connections and the people that we talk to here, it's really important. And even Red Shaydez a guest speaker at our alumni podcast event, she said her friends played a huge role in pushing her music out into campus and became known as that rapper girl.

After that, over this last couple of weeks going into finals and everything like that, I took more of an effort to talk with my classmates in my major. And I'm really glad that I did. Now I know who I'm gonna be going with into this next semester, who some of these classes I can talk to when I'm struggling or...Even just like I took that chance with the professors, talking to them and realizing that, man, everybody here is pretty cool. That's when I finally started to understand what people meant by the college experience. So how do we kind of foster that on our own campus or even in Fitchburg? I mean… I think it starts with the small changes. A conversation.

Kind of taking that moment even in those gen eds where you don't really relate at all or even going into different fields and striking up a conversation. Maybe asking like, hey, like get the homework done or something else. A shift away from our kind of purely individualistic or norms or towards something more opening, community-orientated. Kind of not thinking about how like, the next homework assignment or something like that. Maybe just taking that chance to be like, okay, I got this assignment, but I'm also here with other people that are trying to pass this class as well. It kind of makes you realize you're not alone.

It starts with learning and that's kind of why we're here, why we gather at Fitchburg State, and I think that's how we fly. It's how we fly like our Falcon. Thank you for listening!

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Matt Baier: You’re listening to Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State University Podcast Network.

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