A Week at Wake: Monday

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A football coach and a professor walk into a barbershop.

This is not a joke.

In his first year, Head Football Coach Jake Dickert has become a regular, swinging by the campus barbershop on a Monday last September for a trim before his weekly press conference. “We’re coming off a bye week, so we have a little extra time, and Dean always makes me look good,” Dickert says, referring to Dean Shore, one of two barbers who have cleaned up generations of Wake Foresters. 

Across the room, Research Professor and Emeritus Professor of Physics William Kerr is in the chair that belongs to Lloyd Howard, who arrived in 1976. Back in the day, the shop was in Taylor Residence Hall. (It’s since moved across the Quad to Kitchin.) Kerr has been getting his hair cut here since the early 1970s, and Howard chimes in: “We grew old together!”

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A quick walk around Reynolda Hall lands you at “Milkshake Monday” in Benson University Center’s food court. Vice President for Campus Life Shea Kidd Brown, or “Dr. Shea,” as students know her, holds a tray of cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla milkshakes. Students can wipe out the milkshake supply in 30 minutes, she says — just enough time for a “real-time pulse check.” 

This is “Week Five” of the fall semester, and she notices that students are feeling more settled in than a few weeks earlier, and that they’re looking forward to seeing their parents during the coming Family Weekend. 

Milkshake Monday, and its counterpart, Wake Up Wednesday, have become highlights for students since Kidd Brown brought them to Wake Forest in 2022. “Even at an intimate place like this, it still can feel big,” she says, so she uses these check-ins to stay in touch. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, reach out to me. Let’s grab a coffee,’” she says. “Then I can take the relationships deeper to really get to know them on a one-to-one basis. It really helps.” 

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At 5 p.m., students from the Black Student Alliance, started as the Afro-American Society in 1969 by Howard Stanback (’69) and Freeman Mark (’71), meet up at Campus Garden off of Polo Road. (Stanback, now deceased, went on to a successful career in academia, administration and social services; Mark became a founding partner at intellectual property law firm Mei & Mark.)

The student volunteers are ready to dig in, weeding and pulling up plants in the garden, which, at the end of a busy summer season, is ready to be cleaned up. The garden work is one of many service projects that BSA takes on each year, along with volunteering for Project Pumpkin, tutoring elementary school students and building desks for local children. 

Junior Rhian Delgado, who came to the garden last year with BSA, says that working in the dirt together makes conversations with other volunteers — and potential new friends — more open, and you learn new skills along the way. “I think part of coming is not knowing what you’re doing. … It’s a lesson every time we come,” she says. 

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Just down the street, about 20 School of Business alumni gather on this balmy night for a networking happy hour at Campus Gas, the longtime service station that John Clowney (’05, MSA ’06), Ben Ingold (’05) and Will Volker (’05, MSA ’06) transformed into a twinkle-light-filled watering hole in 2018. Their friendship dates back to freshman year in Bostwick Residence Hall. They reunited to start a hard cider business, Bull City Ciderworks, and then to transform a historic landmark — remembered by many Wake Foresters as the mechanic within walking distance — into a local spot for beer, wine, hotdogs and sandwiches.

Ingold stopped by with his 3-year-old daughter Bailey, who found a mid-century coffee table irresistible as a gymnastics platform. (“Watch this!” she implores. “Bailey, what have we said about shoes on the furniture?” her father responds.) He’s happy to give a quick tour of Campus Gas’s recent refresh as a collaboration among several vendors selling coffee and THC beverages along with the trio’s Bull City Cider and a new menu of tacos, burritos and quesadillas.

“We’re three friends who have done this together as the pandemic hit and people quit going out for beer,” Ingold says. “Now we’re spreading the overhead and bringing more options to the neighborhood.”

A hot topic at the happy hour: That afternoon’s talk at Farrell Hall by Tyler Shultz, who at just 22 risked his career and relationship with his family to expose the multi-billion dollar fraud perpetrated by Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her biotech company. Students, faculty and alumni crowded into the 400-seat Broyhill Auditorium in Farrell Hall, spilling into the aisles and along the walls. 

“You are in the exact shoes that I was in,” Shultz told them. “And you can take this really unique moment in your life to either speak truth to power, or start a company, or get a new degree, change your field, move to a new country. There is some big, but calculated, risk that you can take in your life right now.”