For a pair of Tulane students, a fall unlike any other.
Sarah Atkinson and Matt White never thought they'd be anywhere but New Orleans this fall. Juniors at Tulane, Atkinson and White anticipated cheering on the Green Wave football team, wearing shorts into November, taking classes to fulfill their majors (neuroscience and German for Sarah; math and economics for Matt), and serving as resident advisers for freshmen arriving on a campus that is less than a mile from Bourbon Street.
Even when hurricane Katrina cut a swath through the Florida Keys and began its slog through the Gulf of Mexico in the direction of New Orleans during the last week of August, Atkinson and White didn't give much thought to an evacuation—much less an autumnal relocation. "To be honest, up until Friday [two days before Katrina made landfall and a mandatory evacuation order was declared], we hadn't heard anything about the hurricane," Atkinson says. "We were really stressed about getting the new dorm ready"—Atkinson softly chuckles at the irony—"and really, it seems we get hurricane warnings every fall." On Saturday, Freshman Move-In Day, Katrina had been upgraded to a Category Three hurricane and appeared to have New Orleans square in its sights. By 11:00 that evening, Tulane announced that the university was closing, and the dorms were to be evacuated.
White and Atkinson jumped into a car with a handful of friends and headed due east on Interstate 10, bound for Florida, where they planned to wait out the storm. While spending most of their time glued to the Weather Channel, emotions swung from euphoria (Monday: "New Orleans dodged a bullet") to despair (Tuesday: "The levees had breached and the city was flooding"). With nowhere to go, they drove through the night on Tuesday to Atkinson's parents' house in Washington, D.C. Within days, they began searching for alternate places to study for the fall semester.
"At first, I was in denial," White says. "For about a day, I was insistent on returning to Tulane by September 15. But then I realized that there was nothing to return to."
A family friend—Jessica Singleton '08—encouraged White to look at Middlebury, and though Atkinson had never been to New England and White had only ventured to the North Country once (as a youngster), they arrived on campus, with seven other students displaced by the hurricane, in time for the start of classes on September 12.
"Going from an urban environment at Tulane to a small college in a classic New England town is kind of like going abroad to study," White laughs. "But if you ask any of our friends"—who are at places like Cornell, Northwestern, and Columbia—"no one is as happy as we are."
Atkinson says that she was initially skeptical about taking neuroscience classes at a college, rather than at a university, but she quickly found that she had nothing to worry about. "We actually get to work with mice here, which may not sound like a big deal, but it is," she says. "At Tulane, the grad students steal all the mice for their work."
Atkinson says that her parents plan on visiting this fall—"They weren't going to come down to Tulane, but now that I'm in New England …"—and White says, that while they look forward to returning to Tulane in the spring, they're really enjoying their time in Vermont.
"We went apple picking on Sunday," he says with a smile. "How cool is that?" —MJ