Written by John Mark Adkison
Leaving home and going to college is rarely a smooth and easy transition for students. Usually students are merely taking a two-hour drive from one town to the next or hopping over a few states in a three-hour flight, but for those coming across nations and seas, the transition to Harding University is much tougher. These students have to deal with language barriers, different cultural expectations and extreme differences in climate.
One such student is Wojciech Kopec, a long-distance runner for the track team from OIsztynek, Poland.
“The biggest adjustment [to living in American culture]: I did not know English at all,” Kopec said. “I studied German in Poland. The second was cultural and the weather. I had never been in a country where it was so hot and humid.”
Now a senior, Kopec said he has gotten the language down and is double majoring in marketing and international business.
Kopec said he lived in a small village as a child but moved to a big city for his high school education, where he lived in a dormitory and first began getting involved in athletics.
“I went to a big city to high school because I wanted tostartsports,”Kopecsaid. “Iwenttoacoupleweeks of judo fighting, but I had to stop because I broke two bones in my spine. So then I met another friend from my dorm in the school and he got me into sports, and I started running. The guy who trained me was a national champion for the 1,500 [meters].”
Kopec got into long-distance and was originally supposed to run for the University of Southern Cali- fornia. The USC coach went to watch Kopec run in his national meet two weeks after Kopec got second place for the 10K. At the nationals the USC coach went to, Kopec had a small injury in his leg and ran his 5K slower than the time he ran a 10K. Kopec said the coach told him he would have to run a better 5K in order to go to USC. With time running out, Kopec had to start looking for other options to further his education.
And that is when he discovered Harding University.
Kopec said he learned about Harding through a friend at his high school who knew a runner on Harding’s track team. Former Harding long-distance runner Arthur Kern, who was also a native of Poland, spoke with track coach Steve Guymon, who let Kopec join the team without seeing him race.
Kopec still runs the 5K and the 10K, but he has now started running the steeplechase as well.
This winter break, Kopec had the opportunity tojoin fellow runner Philip Biwott as they trained for four weeks in Kenya.
“When I went to Kenya, I learned to not focus on just finishing the race,” Kopec said. “I learned to focus on starting something and finishing it strong. If you want to run, you must train hard but not set too high of goals, because when you can’t reach it you will fall away from your goals and won’t be happy.”
Kopec hopes to continue his education in America by applying to Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale or Stanford. He is also applying to the University of California in Los Angeles in order to pursue a Master’s in Business Administration, hoping to go into international business. He is not sure if he will stay in the United States or return to Poland.
He also plans on traveling to Peru this fall in order to train more for running long-distance and is hoping to add Spanish to his repetoire of languages.
