"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
My name is Nancy Mohr. I graduated in 1955 and my expectations when I graduated were that, I guess I'd go out and change the world. We were all going out and change the world and Mount Holyoke gave you the feeling of "I can do anything". Now that didn't mean that you were going to go out and get a high powered job because I think most of us started at very low level jobs. I had a fifty dollar a week job as an assistant in the copywriting department at J. Walter Thompson in New York. I was going to take the Foreign Service exam and I thought, 'well, I would go and change the world'. But, amazingly enough, I met my husband at the office Christmas party and my world changed in a somewhat different way. All the way through bringing up five children, I did things. I did a lot of volunteer work. I think I used my education in a way maybe that I certainly wasn't thinking about when I graduated because I did not come to Mount Holyoke to find a husband. I always wrote. I mean, writing was my thing. Even when the children were young I would write after they went to bed and I would start writing at ten o'clock and sometimes I would finish at four in the morning. This didn't always happen, but then I'd take naps with the children in the afternoon, But I guess there was something about what you learned here that was a matter of lifelong learning and you realized it very soon and you're open to opportunities, at least I felt that I was. Because we had our children when I was young, by the time I was forty and they were well launched, you know, they were in high school. My oldest was going off to college and I was teaching at a Country Day School. I had no intention of going into teaching when I got out of Holyoke, but I ended up teaching English for ten years and I was a development director, their first one. That led into finally leaving the school and becoming a consultant in development and going all around the country, doing capital campaigns and feasibility studies and still writing all the way along. Writing was my thing. So, my expectations were, I think, just to be open to opportunities and in many ways, I've always teased and said that I had these invisible antennas that stick out atop my head and don't you see them waving around? They snagged things and they snagged wonderful things for me. I mean, I've done projects in this country, I've done a wonderful three year project that took me to Italy nine times in two years, and a Holyoke family over there gave me a flat in Milan that I used for two years, it was mine whenever I went there. And my Holyoke connections,( there's a Mount Holyoke Club in Milan ) have grown and I've found all other Holyoke people whose connections and expectations for what they could do were very similar to what I felt I had grown with. I think this is what is very special about this school. Our daughter Wendy, was in the class of '81 and it was wonderful to see that even though the world had changed and Holyoke had changed a lot, that what she got out of Holyoke in the way of values, and her own ability to kind of feel that this is a very living kind of college. The one underlying part of it is so strong and it builds no matter what the outside world is doing and even though it changes, I think the ability to do anything is there. The one overriding common ground, I think, that's here, and I suspect it's been here ever since the school started, is that somehow you leave this college with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. And you are involved. If you look around, I think you find few Holyoke graduates that haven't found their place in being a volunteer and in finding a way to make a change, to make a difference in giving. You learn how to give, and giving is a pretty nice basis for somebody's life.