Jody showed up for his first class of the fall semester. Now a college senior, school had lost any allure it once had. He had to grind through two more semesters and he’d be done. This was PR 410, a required class in his major, public relations, so he’d expected to see students he knew. Instead his classmates were strangers. When the professor entered he understood. It was old Dr. Magnusen, the hardest grading teacher in the whole school. There was a good chance Jody would fail and have to repeat the class to graduate. Why hadn’t his friends warned him to wait a semester? Magnusen called the roll. When he got to Jody, he looked at him oddly. “Why aren’t you female?” he said. “Where I come from, Jody is a girl’s name. I’m going to call you Joe.” Jody was flummoxed. “It’s the name my parents gave me,” he stammered. “Maybe they wanted a girl, but liked the name so much, when I showed up, they used it anyway.” Almost to spite the tough professor, during fall semester he was the best Joe he could be and got an A.
When spring semester started, he chose Magnusen, who still called him Joe, for his final PR course. He continued his intensive study techniques and enthusiastic class participation, wrote his best papers ever, and again earned an A. Somehow his enjoyment of college had returned. At the last class before graduation, he asked Magnusen whether he’d ever changed another student’s name. “No,” he said. “You were a special case. You needed something outrageous to break through your college burnout. Worked, didn’t it?”
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