From small-town Ivanhoe through tough transitions to a recommitment to rural life: One student’s journey

As a freshman, Emily Clarke’s fellow honors students asked her to explain how, exactly, she’d gotten into the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from a hometown with a population that wouldn’t even fill the seats of Willey Hall.

Maybe the university had “rural quotas” that let her in, the students said. Or maybe her grades were inflated at what seemed like a “terrible” rural high school.

“Like OK, cool,” Clarke said, thinking back to the insulting conversation. “Thank you for telling me I do not belong here.”

Clarke, a successful senior pre-med student, knows better by now. She has risen above such comments with the strong-willed, determined attitude of someone who’s used to working for things the hard way.

Yet sometimes residual doubts from that conversation linger.

Staying in her rural southwestern Minnesota town of Ivanhoe, population 538, would have given her a tight-knit community she has never found in the city. She also could have bypassed the rough transitions some rural students say they face when they move to a large, busy, impersonal campus.

But not making that leap would have also meant failing to pursue her goals of obtaining a rigorous education that, as it turned out, might one day allow her to serve her rural community even better.

Clarke’s experiences, while her own, also underscore the conflicts some students from Greater Minnesota, and particularly from small towns, say they face when they make their way to the Twin Cities campus—moving through loneliness, doubt and uncomfortable adjustments, or confronting stereotypes about rural life. In an AccessU survey this semester, 41 percent of 152 students from outside the seven-county metro area, who said they considered leaving the university at one point, said the main reason was feeling isolated and uncomfortable on campus. By contrast, nearly 23 percent of the 87 metro-area students who answered that question cited that reason.

But in Clarke’s case, those struggles have also revealed her deep resilience and, in the end, her lifelong attachment to her hometown roots.

“I feel like you have to turn in your rural card in order to get your city card. People just assume, ‘Oh, you’re probably different from everybody,’” Clarke said. “Those are things that are intrinsic to who I am—that doesn’t go away.”

Hometown bliss and challenges

Clarke’s hometown is normal for a rural setting, and can seem idyllic for someone on the outside looking in.

Ivanhoe, the smallest county seat in Minnesota with a population of 538, greets passersby with a sign saying “Ivanhoe – A Nice Place to Call Home.”

As a child, Clarke went to daycare on a farm, where she would pick eggs, get lunch from the garden and play with barn cats. She worked a variety of local jobs, starting with picking rocks from the fields at 11. Clarke, a proud 4-H kid and lover of all animals, showed her bunny at the fair. She recalls passing time by taking walks by the river and lying in the bed of a pick-up truck staring at the stars while cracking jokes. It felt wholesome, but she also didn’t have much else to do. While training for triathlons, she would ride her bike down miles of empty highway past wild flowers, prairie and fields of corn.

Clarke went to state and nationals for Future Farmers of America (FFA) for her speech on neonicotinoids killing bees—she was the first person from her high school, Lincoln HI, to qualify for a national FFA event. Her advisor was so proud, he teared up a little. In high school, she did it all—speech, mock trial, national honors society, track and field, cross country, volleyball, basketball, food drives, bake sales for Relay for Life and volunteering at church.

But life had its darker side. In the 7th grade, she developed a serious eating disorder. Her parents found Ivanhoe devoid of the services and facilities they needed to help their daughter. Treatment meant a three-and-a-half-hour drive to the Twin Cities.

She managed that 7th grade year by doing schoolwork almost entirely on her own. When she finally returned to school she was still occupied by treatment, but support from her teachers helped—especially a science teacher named Rusty Nelson.

“He really encouraged me, and recognized that I was smart, that I was talented enough to keep on doing different things with my studies,” she said.

She kept taking advanced science courses, and eventually based her identity around being smart and good at science.

By Clarke’s senior year, her high school closed because the district ran out of funds, so she chose to do PSEO at Southwest Minnesota State University at Marshall. She then got into the University of Minnesota and felt optimistic about her prospects. Then, reality hit.

Campus realities

Her first year at the University of Minnesota meant a difficult adjustment. For a long time, she didn’t realize she her small town’s school district did not have the resources to prepare her well enough for college, but she sees now how challenging those first two years were.

Although she had her sister Megan nearby, Clarke still felt lost and isolated.

“She always loved science growing up as a kid, she really enjoyed her science courses, she did really well in them,” Megan Clarke said.

But Clarke felt unprepared and confused in her science courses at the university.

“That’s always been kind of tough, when you’re exposed to a lot of stuff that you thought you were ready for, and you were excited for, but then it turns out to be a very stressful experience,” said Megan Clarke.

Clarke herself said she felt like she was always catching up, that she didn’t know things that were expected for her to already know. When asking for help from a professor in one of her science courses, he seemed relieved to hear she was switching majors from hard-science focused kinesiology to psychology. She found professors unwilling to work with her disability accommodation. And she describes herself as a “bad honors student,” because she hasn’t done perfectly in every course. Even now, she still has to work hard.

“I lived my life thinking I was a decently smart person, and that was just all shattered by my first semester at college,” Clarke said. “You build yourself up to be this person, and then it’s like, oh no, wait, actually I don’t know how to do any of that, and everyone thinks I’m stupid for not knowing.”

She became severely depressed her freshman year, which would end up becoming debilitating every semester. Eventually she was forced to address these issues head-on, when her depression and the pressure of her work overload was too much.

“It was just rock bottom for me, where I was like I’m not who I thought I was. And, it just felt so terrible,” Clarke said.

In this time of intense depression, stress overload and pre-med pressure, the echoes of her freshman year doubters haunted her. She could hear them saying that she couldn’t do it. That people with her background just didn’t become doctors. That she wasn’t smart enough to be a doctor. But her peers didn’t get it—they didn’t understand her. She can do it, and she is doing it.

Even today, when she is better, those echoes still sound, even distantly. “It still evokes some of those stereotypes where if you say I grew up in a small town, people might be like ‘Oh, so you’re probably kind of racist, you’re probably really homophobic, and you probably eat a ton of meat, and hate the environment,’” Clarke said. “All of those things aren’t true about me.”

Finding her footing

Clarke sought therapy, recovered, and looks back at all of this, not with regret, but with an intense optimism shining though. Now she’s not so isolated, her parents moved to Savage and she feels like she’s headed in the right direction. She said her depression and lack of a foundational science education made things really difficult, but she thinks those experiences made her more compassionate and confident.

Clarke is a vegetarian, tries to smile at as many people as she can, likes talking to strangers and aligns with liberal politics. And, she still feels connected to her rural background, especially her grandparents living near Ivanhoe.

One of her best friends, Bilal Askari, said Clarke is more hardworking than practically anyone else he knows. She’s gritty, a genuine listener and a proactive friend, he said.

“She epitomizes the absolute ideal of kindness. There’s a difference between being nice to people, and caring about them deeply. And, Emily more than anyone else I think I’ve ever met, very effortlessly cares about people, like instinctually,” Askari said. “I think that’s incredibly rare.”

Clarke says her rural background is a core part of her identity. She attributes her strong work ethic, practicality, independence, persistence and practical skills to her rural upbringing.

“A lot of times we talk about it in a self-deprecating way. It’s always like ‘Haha yeah, let’s talk about how I rode a horse to school,’” Clarke said. “But you make those jokes, and you kind of go along with it because it’s not—I don’t think people understand how fundamental it is to who you are, or they assume that you’ve rejected it by coming here. It’s like you’re not a real rural kid anymore because you moved to the city.”

That identity has informed the vision of her future. She also has decided now to become a rural physician, ideally through UMD’s rural physician program.

“I think she would do incredibly well in a rural community setting because she has a respect for it, which is absolutely vital for the humanistic element of medical care,” Askari said.

As a rural doctor, Clarke would want to show young, rural girls all the opportunities they have.

“Part of why I want to work in small towns is so people know that’s a possibility, and little girls might see a young female doctor, and be like ‘Yeah, that is a thing I can do,’” Clarke said.

While Clarke has found her way as a rural student, she still thinks the university has work to do.

“I think it’s definitely a special, a different type of person who goes from a small town and then comes to a big university like this, but I still feel like we’re under-tapped,” she said.