This week I sat down with Peruna handler Cory Mitchell and got the privilege of picking his brain for about 45 minutes in the Fondern Library Starbucks. Mitchell is a junior EMIS major with a minor in sports management. He lived in Boaz his freshman and sophomore year and is still in charge of all of their intramural teams and serves on their commons council. Mitchell loves being involved on SMU’s campus. He served as an AARO and Corral leader this past summer, works in the Simmons dean suite, and serves on the Student Senate as a Lyle chair.
I opened the conversation by asking him what he has in his refrigerator. As a college student your refrigerator’s contents says a lot about you as a person. Are you still on the news year’s resolution with a frige full of kale, or are you more of a pizza bites and pop tarts kind of guy? Cory falls somewhere in-between, he responded that his shelves contained “stuff for peanut butter sandwiches, stuff for meat sandwiches – I always have hamburger meat because that’s good for protein. Actually I just made a ton of angel hair pasta last night, like a whole figgen four quarts of it so I can have it for the next few weeks. Yeah that’s lit, oh and mixers, always mixers.”
We then transitioned to the quintessential interview question. If you could trade places with any other person for a week, famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would it be? And boy did Mitchell deliver with an answer.
“I would have to trade places with Donald Trump’s little son, because he is like ten years old and has no idea what is going on, but he gets to live the dream. With his dad as the president he gets to experience so much, it’s gotta be pretty lit… I feel like that would be pretty awesome.”
Cory is an EMIS major in the Lyle School of Engineering. I wanted to test his college education, so I asked him “how would you explain a database in two sentences to your eight-year-old nephew?”
“There are rows and columns that hold information, that can be personalized,” he responded. “This allows you to know a lot of stuff about a subject.”
Not a bad answer. Not totally right, but to be fair I did limit him.
The next question got tossed around for a bit before he was able to formulate the perfect response. I asked “If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?
“Life of a Stick Bug,” he said.
I was impressed; it was a really deep answer. Funny in the sense that he actually does appear to have the physique of a stick bug but also slightly tragic. His debut album, however, would go by another title, “Running with Mustangs,” he said, “because my flow and my energy is with Peruna.”
Photos courtesy of Cory Mitchell