But jobs, especially, took up big chunks of time. More than half of 12 students who kept diaries for her had paying jobs, working from six to 25-plus hours a week.

The author's small sample roughly reflects a national survey for 2003 showing that two-thirds of all students were working, including 54 percent of freshmen and 88 percent of seniors. Nationally, that survey says, full-time students worked on average 10 hours a week.

AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE

The student experience may play out differently elsewhere, but some students and officials at large private universities say "My Freshman Year" hits home.

"Certain things definitely rang true," says Sara Schapiro, 24, a Duke graduate to whom the author turned for feedback on the manuscript. For example, intellectual discussion in casual conversation was considered "sort of dorky."

This is neither the first nor last time that a person over 30 has revisited the undergraduate years. Rutgers professor Michael Moffatt's "Coming of Age in New Jersey," published in 1989, is considered a classic. Last fall, Roger Martin, president of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., took freshman courses at another liberal arts school as a way, he says, to meet the millennial generation "up close and personal."

For his just-released "Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You; Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess," journalist Barrett Seaman lived a week in the dorm at each of 12 top universities. Tom Wolfe hung out at Stanford and elsewhere for his best-selling novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

Like Moffatt, Small struggled with how to get an authentic experience without compromising her ethics. In earlier fieldwork in a remote village overseas, she identified herself fully to locals but disguised her location in published works. On campus at Northern Arizona University, she says, she used her real name, but fearing that her status as professor would hinder her, she offered only that she was a returning student who was doing research she hoped to publish.

Small says she chose a pseudonym for the book to protect the privacy of her subjects. That has created a stir in academic circles. Small knew she couldn't keep her identity a secret forever, but she had hoped to remain anonymous at least while students she had interviewed were still in school.

Last month, though, the New York Sun identified her as the likely author. That prompted the professor and her university to reveal her identity. Regardless of any fallout, she says, the experience has made her a better professor.

'CULTURAL DYNAMICS'

Many of the book's observations and informal surveys jibe with national studies of student behaviors and attitudes. And Small says the student perspective could be useful to campus officials who deal with issues such as cheating or academic engagement. "Most of the time people use statistics to make policy decisions," she says. By "not recognizing the cultural dynamics, they may be barking up the wrong tree."

In one example, she tells of administration-led time- and stress-management sessions in which students were advised to mark deadlines in day planners.

But she discovered students had their own guidelines for managing the demands of college, such as taking easy courses to balance harder ones and avoiding Friday classes as a way to protect "one's right to socialize, travel, sleep, party, and/or work," she writes.

Cheating, too, was a strategic response to what they viewed as unfair or unrealistic teachers or policies. It is OK, one person told her, "if you don't (care) about the class but are required to take it and ... the info they are making you learn you know you won't ever use again."

"The key was not, as college officials suggested, to avoid wasted minutes," she writes. Rather, it was about regulating the workload and doing no more than necessary.

In another case of misplaced emphasis, "My Freshman Year" details numerous failed attempts in the dorms to create community. Movie nights fizzled. Mandatory hall meetings were largely ignored.

Further investigation led her to conclude that most students felt they had a community — which they defined, she says, as basically "the four other people they do everything with." Rarely were those people racially diverse.

CUTTING CORNERS

As for academic engagement, freshmen gathered to talk about a book they were to have read over the summer.

Discussion sputtered in both of the sessions the author attended, and in one, more than half the students acknowledged that they hadn't finished the book. In regular courses, students rarely spoke; when they did, there was little debate.

It was sobering, she says, to realize "how little intellectual life seemed to matter."

Even so, Small found answers to many of her questions. After all, she, too, had found no time — or reason — to visit her instructors' offices. And she, too, had cut corners.

Today, as a professor, she tries not to let certain things — eating in class, the apparent lack of interest — bother her. She has tightened her reading list, assigning only those texts she intends to discuss. She gives credit for writing discussion questions in advance.

The year after she returned to her role as professor, she was named teacher of the year — a student-nominated campus honor.

She still grapples with the content of classroom discourse, but students are speaking up more. And if a student appears to be falling behind, she offers to help.

More than ever, she says, "I'm rooting for them." If she learned anything, it was "compassion."