[UC Davis School of Agronomy, 1950s]

[Music] baseball, basketball, football, swimming, and track. There was something going on throughout the school year. [Music] This is one of the activities some of the girls took [Music] up. Of course, I had to find time to study and to do my homework. Nobody forces you to study, but if you don't, you find yourself in trouble when exam time comes, so I hit the books pretty [Music] regularly. Exam time. This was something else that taught me a lot about what a college education means. I found that you just can't memorize a lot of answers and go in and write them down. You have to be able to add up what you know and come to new conclusions. You have to know a lot of wise. Along about the time of midterm exams in my sophomore year, I decided I needed to talk to my adviser about my choice of a major. I'd gotten a taste of agricultural subjects in my first two years, but I still hadn't made a definite decision about my major. Well, I've been thinking about it and talking to some of my friends, Dr. Harrison. I don't think that I really know enough about agriculture to be sure in my choice of major. Well, how do you think you should go about finding out? Well, I thought that I'd probably read some books on agriculture or maybe talk to some people who know. Well, where would you find these people who know? Well, I I would imagine that they would be on a farm somewhere. Well, Steve, I have a suggestion to make, and this is something that we encourage all of our students to do. Why don't you consider taking a job on a farm for the summer? This will give you some practical experience in farming, an experience that'll be valuable to you regardless of what you ultimately do. And it'll also give you a chance to meet some of these people who know about careers in agriculture. And also it'll give you a chance to find out what phase of agriculture that you like best. Uh and by the way, Steve, remember that the purpose of a university education is to prepare you to be flexible in your job and as a citizen too, to enable you to cope with changing situations. Now, these aren't just idle words. We found that a good many of our graduates go a long ways in fields that they didn't even dream of entering when they were undergraduates. Well, maybe those are the people that I should talk to. Well, who knows? Maybe if you pick your summer job with that in mind, you'll meet some of these people. Now, what I'd suggest is that you go over to the man [Music] who I learned a lot about practical farming that summer. [Music] I learned how you prepare the ground for planting and for irrigation. I learned about all the complicated machinery that has been developed to make farming efficient. But I also found out a lot about how important people, educated people are to farming. My boss spent quite a bit of time showing me how things worked. He also told me about all of the industries and businesses that serve modern agriculture and how necessary an agricultural education is in these fields. I was amazed to learn how much you have to know and how much planning goes into raising the crops you see growing every [Music] day. Take the matter of weeds. Everyone knows you have to get rid of them, but there are a great many technical and economic complications to how you do it. Sometimes you can use spray. Other times you do it with [Music] machinery. But there are times when they have to be pulled out by hand. This means hiring a crew. A matter of agricultural economics. When you go out and put siphons in the ditch, somebody has to know how much water the plants need and how much it costs fertilizer. There were people other than my boss who were important to what we were doing. There was the field representative of the sugar company who came out at regular intervals to take beet samples for sugar content tests. He was a graduate of the University of California working on his first job. Then there was a man from the chemical spray company an enomologist. He made tests of the insect population and made recommendations about the use of insect sprays. This field didn't need any. And there was a man I never saw close up. He ran a crop dusting service. It was all done with airplanes. By harvest time, my viewpoint toward agriculture had changed. I knew a lot more about what it required in the way of education and more about what I liked. I'd been particularly interested in field crops, but I'd also been fascinated by the problems of running a large operation like the one where I was working. So, I decided I'd major in aronomy, but I'd squeeze in as many courses as I could outside my major. Things that would help me understand the overall picture of production agriculture. When I got back to school in the fall, I found that a lot of things were the same and a lot were [Music] different. The courses I was taking, they were more advanced agricultural subjects. I was taking aronomy courses, a course in pomology and one in irrigation. I was beginning to understand the scientific basis of agriculture. I didn't have the same classes as my roommate anymore. Jerry was also getting into the swing of his major. That fellow I had sat next to in my English class was getting intimately acquainted with bugs. He was planning to be a research man, which meant going on to take a higher degree. Once I said to him, what do you want to spend the rest of your life looking through a microscope for Steve? He said, the important thing about research is not what you see through a microscope. It's what you do with the information you get. I suppose he's right. But when I find out something about agriculture, I want to be able to see my results in increased production right away. It's just a difference in viewpoint. I suppose I didn't see Linda in class at all anymore. She was learning about nutrition and decorative arts and things like that. A lot of girls in the college of agriculture major in home, but there are many in other majors, too. During their senior year, the girls in home economics live for several weeks in what they call the home management cottage. They practice all they've learned about home economics, and sometimes they invite guests to dinner or lunch. I certainly couldn't complain about the food they served. I don't know how much time I spent waiting to take Linda to dances. There were quite a few of them, so I guess it amounted to quite a bit. [Music] In the last half of my senior year, I took a course in farm management. In the lab, they gave us a problem to plan the management of a farm in the area near the campus. It was a real place with real problems. We knew what types of soil it had, what equipment, how the irrigation ditches were laid out, and so forth. We had to make a plan for running the place. Should we plant several different crops? What kind of fertilizer should we buy? Would some fruit trees go well? Could the place support some livestock? If so, what kind? Finally, I had to sit down and write a term paper. There I was writing learnedly about aronomy, pomology, animal nutrition, irrigation, all those things that are necessary to production agriculture. And when I was writing about irrigation, I was using what I had learned in my physics courses. When I wrote about animal nutrition, I was thinking about chemistry. When I wrote about field crops, I was thinking about botany, chemistry, soil science, and genetics. My four years in college suddenly seemed to all tie together. The groundwork for specialization I had laid in my freshman and sophomore years, my conferences with my adviser, the work I had done on my summer job, the bull sessions with fellows in other majors. The courses in my junior and senior years had taught me a lot more than just aronomy. I found that I had a pretty good idea how to begin analyzing farm problems in general. Of course, when you're a senior in college, you think you know a lot more than you do. I guess you start learning a lot more when you get out on your first job. But anyway, I'd learned a lot of fundamentals and a lot about how to go about learning more. You go to college to learn about learning. It sounds funny, doesn't it? But I guess it's as good a generalization as anything else. Steven James Wilson, Bachelor of Science. In his own words, a man who has learned about learning, a man who knows how to analyze problems. Steve and many of the other members of his graduating class will shortly find themselves working in some phase of California's agricultural industry. Whether they work in the field of their majors or some profession they haven't yet dreamed of. Their university training will enable them to meet more efficiently the challenge of the life ahead of them. [Music]