At Harding, some students like to study abroad the spring semester of their sophomore year. Many of my closest friends said goodbye to Searcy for a little while and they were off to Florence or Greece. I was saying goodbye to Searcy as well, but I wasn’t going to Europe or even Latin America. Instead, I was saying goodbye to Searcy for good and transferring back home to the University of North Texas, where I was hoping to pursue my dream of becoming a photojournalist. I loved Harding and my network of friends, but there was not a photojournalism program for me to pursue here and the last thing I wanted was to regret not making the move back home to Denton, Texas.
UNT was a whole different world for me. Commuting was my daily routine and the closest parking was a parking lot at the mall that was 10 minutes away. Thankfully there were shuttles transporting students there and from campus. Classrooms were auditoriums and would fill up with 300 plus students. The campus has 168 buildings in the 884 acres so it would take me 20 minutes to walk across campus to my next class. UNT is one of the nation’s largest public universities with 36,000 students, and it made me feel like I was just a number.
Although the change was uncomfortable, this was what I was pursuing and transferring anywhere else was out of the question for me. The classes I was taking were great, but with 300 plus in the classroom, my professors had no idea who I was. I was able to take a visual communication class where the class was no more than 20 students, but at the end of the semester, my professor was still not able to identify me. I couldn’t blame my professors, though, because I too would be overwhelmed with trying to figure out names in a campus of 36,000 students.
The students at UNT were also very different from the Harding student body. A few students that I would sit next to would be hung over from a night of partying…on a Thursday night. In another classroom, my classmates would come up with ways to cheat during a test. With all of this going on, I found myself comparing UNT to Harding. At Harding, my professors knew my name and they would go beyond that and ask me how I was doing. A little further, they would ask me how I was doing spiritually. Although some students would sleep in class, at least they weren’t reeking of alcohol. I’m sure some students have cheated before, but they weren’t consulting with other students openly about it for everyone to hear. My furthest classrooms were only seven minute walks and parking was nowhere near as terrible as UNT. I also was realizing that even though I loved photojournalism, I really didn’t want to become a photojournalist.
So as you might guess, I transferred back to Harding. I don’t want you to think that UNT is some horrible school, because it isn’t. It just wasn’t catered to what I was looking for in my education. I also don’t want you to think that I regret having transferred only to transfer again because if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t appreciate the things that made Harding so unique. Here at Harding I am able to spend my mornings in chapel with the whole student body. In Western Civilization, Dr. Klein prays before every exam. When I walk through the Reynolds building, I am greeted by many of the communications professors. I can go to Dr. Shock’s office where he gives all his students trendy gifts like a key chain that is used for scribbling down ideas. I spend Tuesday nights in the Petit Jean office where I am surrounded by incredibly hard working students. I have sisters through Delta Nu and incredible friends who make up the Harding community. Here at Harding, I don’t see myself as a number, but as a member of the large body of Christ like Paul describes in Romans 12:5.
