Interview with John Strous, 05/03/2017

Daniel Shaw: Todays date is May the 3rd 2017, we are in the Halsey Science Center here at the UWO campus. My name is Daniel Shaw, I am here with John Strous. We are doing an oral history interview for the Campus Stories Oral History Project. How are you today John?

John Strous: I am very good.

DS: That's good. So John, where did you grow up? What is your hometown?

JS: My hometown in Juno, Wisconsin but I was born in Columbus, Ohio. When I was about three years old, my father moved his family to Juneau, Wisconsin to open a veterinary practice. He was a large animal veterinary and worked in Juneau from about 1951through 2004.

DS: So large animal veterinarians, do they work on farm animals?

JS: Mostly cows, dairy cows, a little bit of work on horses. He also had a 00:01:00small animal practice at his house where he saw some dogs and cats, but his main focus was dairy cows.

DS: So what was the town like? Was it a small town in Wisconsin?

JS: Small town in Wisconsin, about 2,000 people back then everybody knew everybody. When it came time to go out and play mom would just scoot you out the door and say go play. It was relatively safe; we didn't have any large problems. If you screwed up somebody would tell mom and then you would get in trouble later.

DS: Were you into any sports? Throughout your childhood?

JS: I was in a small town so I was able to get involved in all kinds of things that probably wouldn't have been able to at a bigger school. I was no great athlete but they needed people on the team so I got to play high school football, basketball, and track.

DS: Do you have any siblings?

JS: I have two younger brothers. A middle brother, Bill, and a younger brother Bob.

DS: What did your mother do as you grew up?

JS: My mother was a housewife and ran my father's practice, his office out of the house. His veterinary business he ran out of his house. So mom was for a long time his office receptionist and the bookkeeper for his practice, she was a jack-of-all-trades.

DS: Did you end up seeing your Mom around the house more than your Dad? Was your Dad out working most of the time?

JS: Yeah a lot of the time he would be out in the country. Dairy practices have changed a lot, so know you have really really big herds, these super milking herds that you hear about with thousands of cows. But back then you what you would have is a lot of smaller farms with somewhere between 20 and 60 cows and the milk trucks running around the country picking things up. So there were a lot of different clients to go see. He was an aggressive driver, they 00:03:00used to call him the low flying plane.

DS: Low flying plane?

JS: Yes, he drove around very quickly.

DS: Did he ever get into any trouble for that? Any tickets?

JS: Certainly! Yeah you bet.

DS: Since he was a vet, he had to have gone to a university. Where did he go?

JS: He was a WWII veteran. He flunked out of college before he went off to the war, as I understand the family stories. Then he came back and got himself focused and went to Ohio State veterinary college. Must have graduated at about 1950, somewhere in there.

DS: Did your mom attend college too?

JS: Yup, she went to UW Madison. She was in the very first occupational therapy program at Madison. In fact, when she graduated the school was trying 00:04:00to get accredited and she and all of her colleagues had to go pass the national registry exam in order for Madison to get accredited.

DS: Growing up what kind of personality would you say you had? Were you an active person? Were you a rule follower? Did you go outside the rules every once in a while?

JS: I was the oldest child and probably held the characteristic of such a person and most of us are rule followers. So I followed the rules did what I was supposed to do. Most of the time.

DS: Most of time, yeah. Throughout high school did you get good grades?

JS: I got B's, I grew up in a house where B's were fine. There was no pressure to go off and get all kinds of A's. Which probably did not serve me well later because my Dad was in veterinary medicine and I saw medical things around all 00:05:00the time. Sometime I decided to get into medical practice and I looked at my Dad covered with cow shit at various times in his career and said, I don't know if I like that so much I think I will be a people doctor. So I decided I was going to go to med school. So then I came to Oshkosh.

DS: Looking into different colleges and universities was there any schools that you took interest in?

JS: Nope. There was a certain young lady I was chasing and she came to Oshkosh so I did too. Subsequently I replaced the blonde with a brunette and life moved on but that was the reason why I came to Oshkosh in the first place.

DS: I guess that is a better reason than any. So you came in as a Biology major?

JS: Yes

DS: Because you were pre-med that was a general major to follow into med school.

JS: Yes. Well pre-med, as I learned later in my advising roles, pre-med has a 00:06:00set of requirements you do before you get into professional college but you have to declare a major in addition to that. And in my case, I declared biology because they seemed to go together well.

DS: Was there any other factors that could have led you astray, or any other options that you had other than college that you were looking into?

JS: No. We had the Vietnam War going on at that time and if you went off to college, you were deferred and I thought that was very attractive. I was not anxious to go get sent off into the jungles of Vietnam. As were many of my male colleagues at that time were in the same situation.

DS: Did a lot of people in your hometown of your age make it to college?

JS: Yeah a fair number of kids that went to college. But when I went to college that was a major factor in a lot of the male's decisions. The Vietnam 00:07:00War was not very popular and there were segments of campus that were simply here to not end up in the jungle. I personally wanted to go to college anyway so that was not my only motivating factor, but it was a factor.

DS: The gender make up of Oshkosh at the time consist mostly of Males or Females?

JS: It was probably about 60% male at that time but I am just guessing. It is not like now, over the last 50 years where more and more females have started to come to college over that time period. And think the university is over 50% female now.

DS: Yeah I think there are more females than males now. Paying for college, 00:08:00did you receive any financial aid or scholarships?

JS: I did not receive any financial financial aid or scholarships. I got a lot of support from home but college was not nearly as expensive then as it is now. I studied some of the college bulletins over time just to see how much the tuition was and how much it had changed and in the early sixties there was no tuition expenses at all. You just paid for your books and some fees and you went off to school. Then by the late sixties when I came in you had to pay tuition but I can't remember exactly what it was. It was not a huge amount of money, certainly not as much as you guys are having to pay now. It was the kind of fees that you could go off and

get a summer job and make enough money to pay it.

DS: Coming in as a freshman what dorm did you stay in?

JS: I came to Oshkosh fully confident that I was going to go in one of the high-rises. Oshkosh was bursting at the seams at that time the enrollment was 00:09:00around twelve thousand. There were whole bunches of kids going to school. It was the beginning of the baby boom so there was a lot of rapid growth and Oshkosh had run out of places to put students. I remember driving to Oshkosh with my mother and I had a typewriter size piece of paper that was the map of Oshkosh and the campus fit in about the lower right hand corner and there was a little dot for East Hall. And east hall was an old *inaudible* priest retirement community of some form that the university acquired and they put students out there. There were a whole bunch of us assigned to east hall. I remember Les Jorgensen, our hall director, got hundreds of requests on day one to transfer out of east hall. Which he said he would not grant any for about a month until we had time to get used to each other. It was about a seven-block walk from campus, it wasn't the most popular place to be in the world. But we 00:10:00spent our month there and we were sort of isolated, became like a big fraternity. And back then you could drink beer when you were eighteen and there happened to be Old Town about two blocks away from east hall. So we would walk over to Old Town and have a good time there and come back to the hall. (laughs)

DS: So for your first week in school then, was that easy for you to adapt to the college social life?

JS: That's a long time ago. I can hardly remember what my first week was like. We made good friends at east hall. We went out, played hard, and probably spent too much time playing too hard from an academic standpoint. There was a good group of guys.

DS: That's good. For the general set of classes you had to take coming into UWO what kind of general classes were there? Just basic English, Math, and Science?

JS: I think the gen. ed. When USP came on board, which you are familiar with. 00:11:00Before that, they talked about how the gen. ed.'s had been in place for something like forty years. Which may have been true which would mean that they were similar when I started most at that time. There was a collection of social sciences classes you were expected to take and humanities classes you were expected to take. So we had History plus a couple other areas, we had a couple of required English classes, we had our Math requirements, and then our social science requirements. So not all that different over many years of that *inaudible*

DS: So the curriculum for the Biology Department at the time, comparing it to the Biology curriculum now, can you see a drastic difference?

JS: I don't know if it is a drastic difference there were actually a lot of similarities. You know we have our basic Biology classes like they have now. They are a little bit different. And there has been an explosion in the 00:12:00information that has been covered over that period of time.

DS: For the resources that were available to you in your studies or research or laboratory sciences. Was there an abundance of resources at the time since Oshkosh was expanding?

JS: I don't know if you would say we had an abundance of resources. As a freshman- sophomore you didn't really know what you were supposed to have. It seemed like we had what we needed to have to do the work we did in our classes and our labs etc.

Since I have been in the administrative position for many years in the Med. Tech. program I can tell you that now I know that our supplies and our equipment budget has been cut many many many times. Relatively speaking the departments had a heck of a lot more money for equipment and supplies back in the early 70s late 60s than they do now.

DS: The teaching style compared to high school and coming into college was it very different for you? What was the teaching style like for your professors?

JS: The expectations were a lot different. I as a high school student was not that different than many high school students I run into now. Where high school was actually pretty easy. I was bright enough so that I didn't have to work very hard to succeed in high school. Then I got to college and I didn't know how to be a student and the expectations were ramped up so at least initially that was a struggle.

DS: Communicating with your professors I am sure was a lot different than today.

JS: You had to go talk to them. (laughs) It's not like today. You couldn't Email one, you couldn't send a text etc. So if you wanted to talk to your professor you had to physically go talk to them face to face. And if you really needed to see them and they weren't in their office when they were supposed to 00:14:00be, you would sit in the hallway and wait.

DS: Were they usually on campus most of the day?

JS: hmmmmmmmmm

DS: Because a lot of professors now have very specific office hours where they allow kids to come see them.

JS: Back then they had office hours too. That is hard for me to answer because most of the ones I remember were in Halsey where I had my science classes. I really can't answer that well for you, I am not sure if it is a lot different.

DS: Were there any professors that you took a specific liking to?

JS: Oh sure there were a couple. I remember Leonard *unclear* he was my introductory Biology teacher. He was a very engaged man, I got to him well later when I worked with him on the staff. He cared very much about his students. I remember one time he was teaching a 5 credit general Biology course, which I did very well in, and I very much enjoyed him as a professor. 00:15:00But I remember he came in after one test and he was just ready to spit nickels. And he looked at the class and said, "A third of you didn't make the chimpanzee score on the last test." And he just apoplectic.

DS: Outside of class did you spend a lot of time studying?

JS: Not nearly as much as I should have. As I told you I came from a house were B's were fine. And I thought I was going to be a pre-med, but I still had this mentally ingrained B's were fine thing. I think it's interesting now that professionally, as the Program director of the Med. Tech. I spend a lot of my time advising students and a lot of my time recruiting for the program. Back when I was a student, I was recruited by the blonde I was chasing and I didn't go see an academic advisor until I was a second year senior. So I didn't do 00:16:00what I was supposed to be doing.

DS: But you somehow got through though.

JS: Well I somehow got through, I got mostly B's and about the time I figured out that med school wasn't going to work was when I figured out that B's were not going to make it, you needed to be getting A's.

DS: So on the weekend life did you just hangout with friends? Go to the bars? Did you go fishing? Any sports?

JS: Occasionally we would attend sporting events. Oshkosh's basketball team was very good at that time but we were way out in the east hall so it was a pain to come into campus, so we didn't do that a lot. I probably played much too much, as I said you could drink beer when you were 18 then and some of us would go out and drink beer 4 or 5 nights a week. We slowly figured out that that was a little too much.

DS: Did you participate in any clubs or organizations on Campus?

JS: I was involved with the Reeve Union Board for a while and I was a resident 00:17:00assistant. You call them CA's now I think? Well we were RA's back then and I was a resident assistant for three and a half years, so that was a long time. I remember when I first got the job they took me to my office that I was going to live in and there was a half-moon crescent in the door from when someone fired a garbage can at the head of the previous RA that I was replacing. So it was an interesting time, and I think that was at the end of my freshman year. So when I was able to start the next year and try and establish a tenor in the hallway. My buddy and I were both RA's on the floor and decided that we would enforce the rules and try to make a nice quiet floor where people who wanted to study could actually sit in their rooms and do that etc.

DS: So was the setup for the dorm, was it all boys on one floor?

RS: It wasn't just floors it was the halls.

DS: It was the hall?

RS: Oh yeah. The integration of males and females in one hall hadn't happened then. So there were men's halls and women's halls. There were people that sat at the desk. In fact, that was one of my jobs, after I graduated, was to sit at the desk at Webster Hall and make sure no evil men snuck upstairs after midnight. (laughs)

DS: So men had a curfew to where they weren't allowed in the dorms.

JS: I don't recall a curfew but there were times of the day where men were not allowed into the women's dormitories. And I can't remember the exact structure of when you were, it was very limited. The boys didn't go into girl's halls and the girls didn't go into boy's halls.

DS: Because now I know they just have half and half on each floor.

JS: A much different environment now.

DS: Yeah that is for sure.

JS: We were much more puritan back then. Not that boys and girls didn't do what boys and girls do, but the rules were different.

DS: Greek life on campus. Was Greek life a big thing?

JS: Greek life was there but I was off at East Hall and I ignored it. I never got involved much with it. But I was only at East Hall for the first year after that I was back on campus. I just never got involved much in Greek life, it was there I just never paid attention to it because I wasn't drawn to it.

DS: Moving from Juneau, WI being it was a small of 2,000 people. Moving to Oshkosh was it a big change for you getting used to the city?

JS: Well it was going to the "big city" 50,000 a big deal. Was it different? Yeah. Was it hard to adapt to? Not really. Not that I recall.

DS: Did you ever go off campus to do anything other than the bar? Like go downtown.

JS: We usually went off campus to the bars somewhere (laughing).

DS: Would you say the population of Oshkosh was majority white male/female?

JS: Oh yeah. Oshkosh is somewhat more integrated now but not a whole lot. And back then it was very little.

DS: Well that pretty much all of northern Wisconsin. So I know in your second year you were a CA, or RA, and right around then was the Black Thursday Protests. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

JS: I was not. I was an RA then but I didn't know any of the specifics. I just remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the residents in the hall and they all got quite excited because I believe the university closed a day or two early. I believe it was for Thanksgiving break, whatever break that was around then, and they were excited that they were getting extra time off. They didn't 00:21:00really know the specifics of what was going on. Later we found out that the university was busy expelling people who were not even on campus, which was really quite sad, but we weren't really plugged in to exactly what was happening at the time.

DS: Did you witness any of the protests? Or people gathering?

JS: I witnessed protests associated with the war, not specifically with Black Thursday. That was around the time there was an anti-war demonstration at Oshkosh when I was a resident assistant in Nelson Hall. And a bunch of students built a burning barricade across Algoma Blvd. right between the high rises and Nelson, which is now Horizon, Nelson was torn down. Then there was another bonfire they built across the road down by the Nursing Education building. So there was some construction equipment around, some pickaxes and hoes and etc., 00:22:00and I don't know where they got the wood but they built a bonfire across the road, and would be busy pick axing at the road and trying to tear things up at one bonfire and the police would show up at the other one and then a bunch of people would run down there and sort of man the other fire. Some of the residents in Nelson and people like me weren't all that excited about the war but we really didn't think that burning whatever they were burning on the barricades across Algoma wasn't the best way to show that. So we would sneak out and steal their tools when they were at the other bonfire and hide them in the basement of the hall. But anyway, that went on for a while, that went on all night. I distinctly remember watching. I had a window that just overlooked the whole thing, and I remember the crowd dwindling as it got later and later and then probably somewhere around 4 or 5 in the morning. I remember watching, I don't know if it was 3 or 5 big Oshkosh bi Gosh snowplows with the big 00:23:00V-blades in front of them coming down the street in a V formation, and by that time there were just a handful of people left by the bonfire, and they pushed the bonfire and all of the stuff off to the sides of the road. And then coming a long way behind them were national guardsmen that fell out along Algoma all the way through campus with their face shields that covered from their heads to their knees and their batons with them which looked probably bigger in my memory than they actually were. But they fell out every 10 or 15 yards on either side of the street, and then behind them came the quick Crete truck with the patching material and they repaired the road and brought the little rollers in and flattened it all out and went on their merry way. And by 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning the road was repaired, all of the debris and stuff had been carted away, and there were national guardsmen every 10 or 15 yards down the road and nobody 00:24:00caused any trouble. It was interesting to me that, just read the newspapers later, and you read the paper about this anti-war demonstration at Oshkosh involves thousands. Well, not really because if you were there you could see there were one hundred or two hundred people at the bonfires promoting that, and there were a couple thousand people out watching them. They weren't demonstrating one way or the other. They were just watching them, but that's not what was reflected in the paper.

DS: Why do you think they did that?

JS: Why they reported that?

DS: What do you think the line is between demonstrating and observing?

JS: Well if you are just observing, you are standing there going, "wow look at all this." And if you are a demonstrating, you're out there throwing wood on the fire or running around with your placard and etc. So I would guess in my mind that the difference would be active participation. But if you are a reporter and you are trying to sell newspapers, thousands is better than hundreds.

DS: So you said you would go steal the pick axes and the tools from them. Were you more about protesting in a different way other than tearing up property?

JS: I would happily had protested against the war with placards and demonstrating in that kind of way, but I didn't feel that physical damage was the way to go about it. But obviously were other people with other opinions.

DS: Yeah. You said there was a big expansion of students on campus during his time and they had to open up the dorm down campus that you lived in 5 blocks away from campus. In the years to come did they build any, how did they arrange for more people to come into the campus?

JS: I think that was sort of the peak here and after that things gradually dissipated, so the numbers came down. That was right about the time when they 00:26:00built the two high rises which handled most of the increase very nicely.

DS: Is that the Scott's?

JS: Gruenhagen and North I think it is?

DS: Yeah.

JS: Or is it Gruenhagen and Scott.

DS: Yeah the Scott's North and South.

JS: Okay North and South Scott and Gruenhagen. Now is it Gruenhagen now that they use as an outreach thing, yeah? One of them doesn't have students there anymore.

DS: Gruenhagen has some students on some floors, but they leave some floors I know for people off campus to come and stay if they need to, or for summer camps. If kids come back.

JS: So we don't need all that space anymore.

DS: Yeah. Right.

JS: The change in housing that has occurred I think has been primarily private housing. So most of the stuff across from the high rises back behind the subway station. That stuff between there and main street that has come up, those apartments that they rent to students. None of those were there.

DS: Notoriously Oshkosh has had a problem with dropout rates and kids returning for their sophomore year on campus. Did you ever experience any of that with you friends not returning sophomore year or junior year?

JS: People came and went I didn't really connect to a major sophomore dropout rate or anything like that. Sometimes people changed their mind but I was not really aware of that as a quote on quote problem.

DS: For the people who lived on campus, what type of personalities were there? Normal? I guess if you could classify people as like jocks or nerds or whatever you have.

JS: We had all of those things too. When I was in Nelson it was viewed as the jock hall. So a lot of the people in athletics lived in that hall. But we had nerds, we had you know hippies, all kinds of different things.

DS: Were there any VET's on campus from the Vietnam War that came back?

JS: I am sure there were. I don't recall them as a unified force and I am quite sure from what we know now they were treated very badly when they came back.

DS: Yeah I understand that too. A lot of people wanted to protest hem going over seas?

JS: Well they were protesting the war, a lot of people, and when the veterans came back they would protest them, they would scream baby killer at them and stuff like that and didn't have enough appreciation for the sacrifice they were making. I think it was colored by the general hand tied war tenor, and I don't think people though it through well when they transferred that angst on the veterans who were coming back. And I knew a bunch of the guys who went off and were veterans and they didn't want to be there any more than the people who were 00:29:00*inaudible* wanted them to be there.

DS: I know the state had a lot of research funding going on. I know the government funded a lot of research on campuses throughout the university systems across the US. Did UWO receive any funds for any specific research?

JS: I am sure they did but as a student it was not something I was aware of. It was one of those things that happens with my students now, they aren't really aware of what is happening with funding for research. Unless it happens to be a specific professor they are working with on undergraduate research. And undergraduate research was not a big deal then. There were some professors that did it, it was great that they did, but there wasn't a lot of that.

DS: Did you ever think about participating in any research?

JS: No, not as an undergrad. It is not something I pursued. Now I also went to graduate school at Oshkosh and worked with a lovely woman named Mary Rigney 00:30:00and was my major professor and had a great deal of impact on my life, but that was after. What I did was, she was a professor in Microbiology, I had a course with her and was quite impressed with her and a friend of mine approached her and said gee we would like to come to Oshkosh to work on our masters in Microbiology if you will take us as your major professor. We were thinking if she didn't we would probably go off to Madison, and it turned out that she did and it turned out to be a very positive experience for me, she is a wonderful person.

DS: Upon completing your masters at UWO, what did you do after?

JS: That sort of folded in with my afterschool career, so when I graduated in 1972, I had a BS in Biology and like nowadays with a BS in Biology you sort of 00:31:00have to go find a job and build a career. I really didn't know what I was going to do with that and I had a friend of mine who was a male nurse and had spent a year in the Navy. He eventually went back into the air force as a male nurse, but before he did that he got a job at the local hospital in the emergency room. Then he invited me to come work with him, they had nursing assistant's / ER technician type positions in the ER. So I got to go work with him for a period of time and I ended up working at Mercy's emergency room for 5 years. While I was doing that I looked around and was still hoping I could go to med school. I was not a realistic student because nowadays I could look at me and tell me that that was not going to happen but back then I didn't believe that. So I thought I was going to go to grad school for a couple years and get really good grades and get accepted into grad school. So I started the Master's Program at Oshkosh 00:32:00in about 74, after I had worked in the ER for a couple years. Then I looked around the hospital and I decided I really like that environment. I like the healthcare environment; I liked the work we were doing in the ER, and work I was exposed to in the hospital. And I looked around and I said, well I could stay here and I could be, and then I looked around, I could be one of those nurses or maybe I could be one of those lab people. And it turned out that being a Medical Technologist because of all my pre-med classes only required that I take an independent internship after I graduated. If I had gone on the nursing route, which in reality would not have fit me as well as Medical Technology does, that would have taken another three years. So I said I will go be a lab person. I was accepted into Mercy's independent school of Medical technology in 1976 and had my internship year in 1977 and became certified as a med tech in 00:33:00January 1978. So that was sort of in the middle of my master's education. So it took me form 1974-1982 to finish my master's but mostly because I was learning how to be a med tech and learning how to function affectively as a professional in the middle of when I was supposed to be doing it.

DS: After you were certified as a med tech did you work as a med tech for that hospital then?

JS: I worked as a med tech at Mercy hospital from-- So I started there in the ER in 73, I think it was, and then I finished my internship in 1977 so I worked as a med tech from 1978-2000. Then I started at Oshkosh as a program director here in medical technology in 1991 and that is still a position I hold. For the first 8 or 9 years here I worked at both places. I did that because I wanted to 00:34:00keep my fingernails in the real world, as far as being a med tech. I talked my friends at Mercy where I had spent 15 years working into letting me come back one day a pay period. Just to keep my fingers in what was really happening in the hospital while I continued to work here.

DS: I am sure being a med tech program director took up a lot of time, did it ever conflict?

JS: Which things?

DS: Being a med tech and a director of the med tech program.

JS: My focus was here. When I say I worked one day a pay period that means I went one day every 2 weeks. Which was an interesting process because I was very accomplished when I originally set that up, but if you come in and do something only one day every two weeks and do that over a couple or three years, pretty soon you aren't as good as you used to be. So my areas of expertise became more 00:35:00limited and as I focused on the things I could still do well. By the time I got near the end of my time at Mercy I was focusing mostly on phlebotomy, obtaining blood samples and the doing cross matches and blood banking where I managed to keep my skills up to par.

DS: Coming in as the Med Tech program director was there any specific things you wanted to bring to the program?

JS: What I concentrated on when I first got the job in 1991, and what I concentrated on for my entire career, was maintaining the really high level of excellence that was here when I entered the program. I came into a very good situation, very good students, and a well-established program that did a really excellent job of educating students to go off for their clinical internships. Then become professional medical technologists and you have to change some things to keep with the times but the primary focus has always been to try and maintain the level of excellence I inherited.

DS: I know there was a lack of med tech professionals at the time, did you ever see an increase in med tech students coming to Oshkosh?

JS: Yes. There has been an ever-increasing shortage of medical technologist over my career. Mostly because the clinical programs have diminished over time to roughly about a quarter of what there used to be. I forget the exact numbers but I think there used to be something like 500-600 independent hospital programs that educated and provided clinical training for medical technologists, and that number has dwindled down to about 200 remaining programs. But the need for med techs has continued to increase so we have an ongoing shortage. That's 00:37:00a common problem in educating people in allied health is having access to clinical seats to give students the hospital experience they need in order to become professionals. The reason that there is an ever-decreasing number of seats is because it is an expensive process for the hospitals, they have to invest a lot of time and effort. Then you have some of the business people gong gee we can't afford that but the flipside of that argument is if you cannot afford it now then you will have to pay for it later when you don't have any staff etc. But that is a constant tug of war in that arena. You run into people in the college of nursing will tell you they don't have enough clinical seats, I will tell you I don't have enough clinical seats, I could easily double the med tech program if I had enough places to put students. That is the limiting factor.

DS: So if you can compare the biggest difference that you have noticed from when you came here as a freshman to current day UWO, what would be different?

JS: I think it is basically that we have sort of grown up, probably the biggest change was when we became a part of the UWO system, and there was some changes in access to different things. For example, before that change if you studied anatomy you worked with a formalized cat, now we formalized cadavers that the university had access to once they became a part of the UW system. Part of the attitude as far as research and our prominence shifted a bit with that change. So if I was going to pick a thing, that would probably be it.

DS: All right, well thank you John.

JS: You are welcome!