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PARTICIPATION IN THEMATIC OPTION IS BY invitation only, and it’s a major enticement in attracting top academic performers – the kinds of freshmen who can write their own ticket. Last fall’s incoming group of 235 students (8 percent of the freshman class) had average SATs of 1431 and GPAs of 4.14, comparable to mean scores
Thematic Option students form an intellectually intense undergraduate community. Last fall’s incoming group had average SATs of 1431 and GPAs of 4.14, comparable to mean scores reported by Princeton, Harvard and Yale.
reported by top-ranked Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Thematic Option students form an intellectually intense undergraduate community, more than half of them living together in Dean’s Hall, a forerunner to USC’s popular residential colleges and the closest thing the university has to a freshman honors house.
Students invited to enter T.O. usually have more than one feather in their caps: last year, 52 were also Trustee Scholars, 70 were Presidential Scholars, 42 were in Resident Honors (an accelerated program for gifted high school seniors), and 14 were in USC’s prestigious baccalaureate/ M.D. program. All turned down admissions offers from places like Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Princeton, Cornell, NYU, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.
Which makes it all the harder to believe what indignities lie ahead.
“Here’s a first paper,” says Romans, glancing down at some unfortunate’s far-from-magnum opus emblazoned with a D-minus. Attached, as a kind of cover sheet, is a three-page justification of the abysmal grade. “Here are some general comments,” says Romans, skimming over the instructor’s single-spaced, typewritten critique, “and here’s what the student needs to do for the next tutorial.” He flips to the essay itself and begins reading. He flinches. “This paper is a mess. The thesis is buried on the second page. I wouldn’t know where to begin, but the writing instructor knows how to make the student rethink and rewrite it.”
Accustomed to straight A’s, the majority of Thematic Option students will taste the misery that awaits the author of this essay. “It does get their attention,” Romans says, smiling. “We don’t want them to freak out if they get a D,” he adds, pointing out that nine out of 10 will bring their grades up to B’s or A’s by term’s end. But that first D is a

T.O. staffers Walkup, Romans and Von Helmolt
wake-up call signaling “what we expect of these freshmen – which is junior- and senior-level composition,” he says. “We know they’re going to become better writers. We want them to become better writers sooner.”
That’s the logic behind T.O.’s linked intensive writing classes and biweekly one-on-one writing tutorials. Students in core 102 (“Quality of Life”) – usually the first class freshmen will take – must enroll in an attached writing section, taught by advanced doctoral students from the humanities and social sciences. In practical terms, this means on top of the three or four critical essays the core professor assigns, students will need to crank out eight more analytical essays on related (but never overlapping) topics. Plus, of course, whatever work is required in their two or three non-T.O. courses during the fall semester.
“We expect them to be able to write already, to know how to construct a paper,” says Dewald. “And by the middle of the first semester, most are living up to expectation.”


“I’LL NEVER FORGET MY FIRST PAPER,” says Tew, reliving the initial shock. “I got a D-minus! I thought, ‘This is unbelievable, I’m an A student!’” Unwilling to accept defeat, Tew did six rewrites on that Freud essay before getting the A she demanded.
Her epiphany, however, didn’t come until the final exam. “I still remember what I was wearing that day,” she says. “I sat down, and the essays just poured out of me in this organic way. When I was finished, I felt like I could have written for 10 more hours. As I handed [professor] Peter Manning my final, I said: ‘Now I understand.’” Twenty-three years later, Manning still likes to tease Tew about that day.
“I think it’s good for the soul,” says T.O. alum Mika Lavaque-Manty ’90, referring to that first bad grade. “We were all great students in high school. We all had this inflated sense of ourselves,” says the former Trustee Scholar from Finland now a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “Getting that slap in the face gives some appropriate humility. ‘Hey, I’m not better than everyone else. In fact, I have to work.’”
And work they do. Assigned readings, by Romans’ own estimate, are ponderous. On average, literature-based courses call for up to 2,500 pages per semester, while social science and history courses, with more dense nonfiction texts, usually weigh in at 1,500 pages.
This may help explain why students jokingly call the program “Traumatic Option.” The nickname was immortalized by T.O. alumnus Van Ling ’86, whose 1983 student film of the same title is now a USC cult classic. The low-budget short – a rapid-fire montage of cascading classic books and images accompanied by a frenzied cello score – conveys
“Students at this level often suffer from ‘imposter syndrome.’ They think that any minute, somebody is going to discover they don’t belong here. We have to guard against that.”
the sense of intellectual bombardment. In one scene, a student dangles precariously from the sheer cliff of a type-written term-paper page.
Ling, who went on to film-tech stardom after supervising visual effects for The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Titanic, calls his early short “an amateurish love-note to the program.”
“The amount of reading and writing that I spoofed not-too-unrealistically is quite a challenge,” he says. “I know what it feels like coming into this program. I know kids who left because they just couldn’t handle it. One reason I created the film was I wanted to say, ‘We all feel that self-doubt, but ultimately you can get through it.’”
Ling’s hommage ends on a happy note, with his fresh-faced protagonist achieving a beatific state of enlightenment. But for each year’s new crop of freshmen, the trauma begins anew.
“Just this morning, we had a student come out of a core 102 class in tears,” says Romans. Her professor had simply said: “pass your papers to the front,” and she bolted. This sort of conduct sounds off alarms in the Thematic Option office. Romans corralled the weeping freshman before she’d left the premises and, after coaxing out her guilty secret (her paper wasn’t finished), persuaded her to march back into the class and confess. Such personal attention – along with high-intensity academic counseling courtesy of Romans and staffers Pennelope Von Helmolt PhD ’92 (who also directs USC’s Resident Honors Program) and Daniel Walkup ’92 (a T.O. alumnus and doctoral student in critical studies) – is the backbone of T.O.
“It sounds a bit parochial, but you have to really watch them,” says Romans of his fragile freshmen. “Students at this level often suffer from ‘imposter syndrome.’ They think that any minute, somebody is going to discover they don’t belong here.” When they feel overwhelmed, they “have a tendency to feel shamed and to disappear. We have to guard against that,” he adds.


THE SOLICITUDE CAN TAKE MANY OTHER forms. When Liliana Loofbourow and a few of her classmates wanted to start a literary magazine, Thematic Option got behind them. Since Palaver debuted three years ago, “T.O. has been our headquarters, has helped with money and supplies. It’s been our lifesaver,” says Loofbourow, now a fifth-year senior triple majoring in creative writing, music and psychobiology. Her core 102 instructor, English associate professor Heather James, signed on as the journal’s faculty advisor and remains Loofbourow’s personal mentor.
“Through T.O. you get these amazing opportunities,” says Loofbourow, a Sacramento native who adds that she “absolutely made the right choice” in passing up offers from Stanford and Harvard to study at USC. “You make contacts that last you your whole time at the university. It’s really priceless, that exposure and input.”
Other examples of Thematic Option attentiveness aren’t hard to find. A $2,000 grant from T.O. helped finance Ethan Shaftel’s 35-minute film, Empire Airways. The aspiring director – who isn’t particularly proud of that early opus, a surreal exploration of freshman alienation – has since bagged much bigger prizes, including a private grant to develop his current project, a feature-length movie based on the Columbine High School massacre. Shaftel, who has known he wanted to make movies since the eighth grade, says T.O. gave him exactly what he wanted from college – a firm liberal arts background before immersing himself in the craft of filmmaking. “I loved getting to talk to Tony Kemp about his ideas and about my ideas. There’s a lot of give and take. And it’s a great peer group. Every class session was a wonderful discussion.”
Bonds that grow out of T.O. can last a lifetime. Ling counts among his dear friends Ed W. Marsh ’88 (film documentarian, Titanic, The Abyss, Stargate) , a fellow cinema-TV school grad and T.O.-er. Jim Piechocki has stayed close with Fred Hatt ’80, now a noted New York muralist, ever since the two partnered on a T.O. film project called Totentanz, examining macabre imagery on European bridges from the era of the Great Plague.
Faculty-student bonds can be equally fertile. As a cinema student, Piechocki formed close ties to the late anthropological filmmaker Barbara Myerhoff, winner of an Oscar for the 1974 documentary Number Our Days. “I got to know Barbara really well,” says Piechocki, who credits his mentor with helping secure an NEH grant that led to his own 1983 documentary, Face the Music, an ethnographic exposé on Elmore City, Okla. (the town that later inspired the film Footloose), where preachers had banned public dancing. “I couldn’t have done that without T.O.,” Piechocki says.
Dewald, who has taught core 102 many times, gets a kick out of letters from past students. “They’ll write to say they’re rereading The Iliad, or they’ve seen a performance of Oedipus Rex, or went to an art exhibition that prompted them to reread Dante’s Inferno. These works continue to mean something to them,” she says.


Photographs by Joe Pugliese

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