The average IU student

Senior Ted Timothy’s life story is anything but average. But on paper, almost everything about Ted — including his gender, age, ethnicity, origin, and even his college major — is typical.

There are more than 42,000 unique students on this campus.  But among the variation, Inside set out to see if an “average” Hoosier exists. Is there someone who falls in the majority of every statistical detail, from gender all the way to college major?

We went number-crunching and looked at enrollment data from the IU Fact Book for the Bloomington campus to try and generate a statistical mode of students. We looked at the most commonly occurring responses from individual data sets for student origin, ethnicity, gender, age, and major to create a profile of the most typical IU student.

Put all of the data together and the numbers point to a person exactly like Ted Timothy. As a white, 22-year-old, male biochemistry major from Indianapolis, Ted is, on paper, the average IU student.

“I’m actually surprised that the most average student is a biology student,” Ted says. “I guess I would have thought it would be a journalism student, or an English student maybe.”

Ted can't control some of the qualities that make him "average," such as his gender or ethnicity. But he did choose the most popular major.  The son of two doctors, Ted says he was always drawn to science.

"It’s interesting to learn how things work in your own body and in the world," he says.
What the numbers don't tell you is  that Ted's pursuit of a biochemistry major didn't start in Bloomington. In high school, he was offered a full ride to IU as a Wells Scholar, but turned it down to study at Harvard. After a year on the East Coast, Ted says he realized he didn’t belong there.

“For me, a lot of the people I lived around my freshman year went out of their way to remind me where I came from, and that I wasn’t involved in their world that they grew up in, like private academy, East Coast, old-money families,” he says. “And it was a big disappointment because I was excited about being there and getting to know people, and people wanted nothing to do with me simply because I was from Indiana. That was really shocking to me.”

Ted says he decided to transfer to IU because his mother works at IUPUI, which made tuition cheaper. He says he also fit in with people in Bloomington.

“It was a good decision, pretty much from the start,” he says. “Once I was here, everything looked much better. I was happier. I felt like I could do a lot more with my time than I was doing there.”

Last semester he worked a graveyard shift at WIUX, the student radio station. He is also a member of the campus sketch comedy group, All Sorts of Trouble for Boy in the Bubble.

“I’ve always really liked doing comedy,” he says. “I think it’s really fun, it’s challenging, and you get to say what you want to say and make people laugh, which is great.”

Life in Bloomington works for Ted in a way it never did in Cambridge, Mass. Feeling alienated by the “average” Harvard student, Ted moved to where he was an average of his own and found his niche.

“I am someone who turned down the Wells Scholarship to go to Harvard, and then I dropped out of Harvard and came here. I don’t think you’ll find anyone else with that kind of story.”