Grand View’s Heidi Pries: back to help
A graduate from Grand View University with a love for helping students transition into college, Heidi Pries continues to keep her school close to home. After graduating in ’97, a lot has changed for Pries around GV’s campus. However, she also had a lot of the same experiences most college students go through today.
What’s one of your craziest stories from college?
“I lived in Nielsen Hall, and when I was a student here, Nielsen was all women and Knudsen was all men. Men could not be in the women’s residence hall past 10 p.m. on a weeknight and past midnight on a weekend. In the entrance of Nielsen, they used to have a sign-in sheet if you had a guest coming in, so if you had a boyfriend that would come over to your room at night, they had to sign in. If you didn’t come down and check them out, security would come to your room and escort them out. Probably my most favorite memory was sneaking into the guys’ residence halls and climbing through the first floor windows. Upperclassmen learned very quickly to request the first-floor rooms.”
Photo by Wes Higgenbotham
Have you ever skipped class?
“I did, and I always tell my students that I did skip. I would usually try to allow myself for each class to skip at least once a semester. So if I were taking four classes, then I had four days and I usually never used them all at once. I often say to my students that once you skip, it’s like opening Pandora’s box. You think it’s okay, so then habits start to begin. I would usually bank it until after mid-semester when I was just really busy. It was kind of like a gift that I would give to myself, but I didn’t skip a lot. There were a couple of days where I just wanted to sleep or finish “The Bold and the Beautiful,” so I need to stay here and watch the rest of that instead of going to my 1 o’clock class. Most of my classes were if you skipped more than twice your grade would drop, so I kept my grades high and didn’t skip very much.”
Were you in any extracurricular activities?
“I was on the radio, wrote for the newspaper and was on the Student Activities Council (SAC). As far as activities for SAC, we used to do a lot of off-campus dances like formals or a Valentine’s dance. My senior year, we tried to do an actual parade for homecoming, but at that point we didn’t have football, we just had soccer, and homecoming was all around our soccer game. We did a parade on East 9th. It was very, very small. Other activities would be that I was the president of student activities my senior year. I did a lot of theater. I had a theater scholarship, so I was in a lot of theater productions.”
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