Whitman College students tell their stories—about their unique experiences in choosing Whitman and being part of the Whitman community and what they love most. This is Gerry’s story.
Gerry Todd is a junior from Seattle, Washington, majoring in politics. He is also a standup comedian who thought it was time for a change after living life on the road. He applied to Whitman which has led him to experience things he never thought he would: the individual attention of his professors and a new appreciation for certain subjects. Gerry says if you’re someone who’s interested in what you’re learning, you’re definitely succeeding at Whitman.
The “Our Whitman, My Story” podcast is a collaboration between the Whitman College Office of Communication and author and podcaster John Moe ’90. To meet more of our talented students follow Whitman on social media.
Whitman College students tell their stories—about their unique experiences in choosing Whitman and being part of the Whitman community and what they love most. This is Gerry’s story.
Gerry Todd is a junior from Seattle, Washington, majoring in politics. He is also a standup comedian who thought it was time for a change after living life on the road. He applied to Whitman which has led him to experience things he never thought he would: the individual attention of his professors and a new appreciation for certain subjects. Gerry says if you’re someone who’s interested in what you’re learning, you’re definitely succeeding at Whitman.
The “Our Whitman, My Story” podcast is a collaboration between the Whitman College Office of Communication and author and podcaster John Moe ’90. To meet more of our talented students follow Whitman on social media.
Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell, how they got here and what happened once they did. And every story is different. This is Our Whitman, My Story. I'm Gerry Todd, I'm from Seattle, Washington and I'm a student at Whitman College, majoring in politics.
Yeah, so at the end of my high school experience, it wasn't working out for me super well, a lot of different factors, but I made the unusual choice to drop out and start doing standup comedy. My life consisted of going to open mics at night, hanging out in the corner of a bar, hoping that nobody would kick me out, working in restaurants, waiting tables. I worked in like every different kind of job that you can have in restaurants and just sitting and writing jokes, trying to figure out what I was interested in talking about, what I was interested in doing. The strangest standup experience I had, and it's a hard thing to really think of because the entire process is so bizarre. But there's one gig that I remember driving down for a show in rural Western Washington for a Cinco de Mayo show.
I got booked by someone over Twitter who no one who I knew had ever heard of this person. She reached out and she said that she'd heard of me, that I was some up-and-coming comic and that she really wanted me again to do stand up for a Cinco de Mayo show in extremely rural Western Washington. And I was like 18, 19 at the time, I wasn't getting paid almost anything. And so to get like a real booking felt like, whoa, this is so cool. Someone's heard of me. So I get to this Mexican restaurant, big patio, and the crowd is entirely like at least 60 to 70 years old. And if you've never been at a situation where you were expecting to go to dinner and have a couple margaritas, and now someone is thrusting borderline amateur comedy at you, that's not exactly what you're looking for on a Cinco de Mayo evening.
Like maybe you think, oh, maybe they'll get like a mariachi band or something. You aren't thinking, oh, there's going to be like an 18, 19-year-old talking to me about his sexual anxieties while I eat my enchiladas. That's not really what people are looking for in that experience. So I'm there. I think I was opening for the jalapeno eating contest. That's the kind of show that this was, and I'm doing my material, and I don't think that people were mad at me. But you could tell that they were mad that I existed in that moment. I say that's a really memorable standup experience. At the same time, that's an entirely normal standup performing experience.
I'd always gotten into standup because I was really interested in the idea of writing for a TV show. That'd always been my dream. And I figured, okay, well, I don't have an education right now, but I'll be able to ... You hear stories about how people can work their way through doing standup. They'll get discovered and someone will offer them a writing gig, or you'll start in submitting scripts and somebody will notice you. And I'd been doing this for a couple years and I was working 30, 40 hours waiting tables. And then during all my time off, I'd be camped out in coffee shops, writing some script. And I realized like, oh, this could go on for who knows how long. This is just such an indefinite process. I want to be at least in a situation where I can get some control over this. I want to have some sort of education that I can have to make this a little bit less of a crapshoot going forward.
When I was applying to various schools, Whitman really ... It was always going to be on the list. I applied to a bunch of places, but when I got out accepted here, it really seemed like, okay, this is going to be the best option for me. Being a non-traditional student at Whitman is a pretty unique experience. You're not going to get the exact classic college experience that you may have pictured just because you're going to be probably five years older than almost everybody else in your class depending on what age difference you are as a non-traditional student. There are perks to it though, just coming from a standup background.
It's really kind of funny because one thing that I've really noticed is watching teachers when they're asking a question to the class and no one raised their hands, I have so much more empathy now than I did as a high school student, because it's like, oh man, they're crashing right now. This is not good. Oh man. I know that feeling. Okay. Okay. I'm going to take one for the team. I'm raising my hand right now. We can't have dead air for this amount of time.
One thing that's unusual about Whitman that really kind of blew my mind when I started coming here was how much individual attention that you get during the school experience? My girlfriend, she went to a really massive university, a lot of my close friends went to really big universities. And when I tell them about just little things about my education here, like a professor read through this one source in my bibliography completely. Like I cited a word or two in a paper I was writing. And she went and read the entire thing to make sure that I understood what was being talked about, that the claims I was making were true. And then she wrote that in her comments about how it was making sense and how all of the pieces are fitting together. And that compared to the big university experience, it's just night and day.
My friends talk to me about, okay. So yeah, you just write the conclusion and the introduction and then just make sure that they are some words in the middle. Because all they're ever going to read is the introduction and conclusion. And that's just not the case at Whitman. Figuring out what I'm going to do after Whitman is still a little bit of a struggle for me. I'm really interested in politics now. I've kind of moved away from the entertainment side of things. It's an open-ended question. I'm looking at law school, I'm looking at government work. I'm just trying to figure out where I can go to help people out the most.
Whitman's really given me an appreciation for a different kind of way of looking at politics than I came here with you. You go into politics normally because you're just a big news junkie. Like you're obsessed with what's going on, right now, usually in the sort of Democrat, Republican binary in America. But studying at Whitman really shows you just how big a world politics can be. All of the different meanings that word can have. It's a really eye-opening experience. I think the thing that everyone should know coming to Whitman College above all else is that you are going to spend a lot of time in the library reading, and it's going to be really interesting and you are going to get really familiar with that library. Also, they're pretty good sandwiches at Graze. I like them.
I think the kind of person who would do really well at Whitman is someone who's interested in their education. And not in just a sort of, I'm going to check the boxes here and then I get to finish off this course. Okay. I don't need to do that. I'm going to check off this. No. The kind of person who's going to do really well at Whitman is someone who's really, really invested in learning about the thing that they're interested in learning. Whether that's politics, whether that's history, whether that's English, it's someone who's going to find that thing that they're passionate about and is going to be really happy to learn as much as they can about it.
I'm Gerry. And this has been Our Whitman, My Story. There are more episodes of Our Whitman, My Story available right now wherever you go to get your podcasts. For more information, go to whitman.edu/stories.
Music for this episode provided by the band, Chastity Belt. The band formed in 2010 when its members were students at Whitman College, and they're still going strong today.