I may be a Clemson Tiger now, but I’ll always be a Highlander at heart. Yes, our mascot is a highlander: a dude in a plaid kilt playing the bag pipes, representing the Scotch-Irish heritage of the western part of Virginia, in the heart of the Appalachian mountains. I love that town and the school. 

This is the place where I discovered physics. 

​I remember starting my senior year of high school not really sure what I wanted to do. Go to college? What were my other options? It didn’t really occur to me to start thinking about these things so far in advance. Soon, into the fall semester of my senior year, everyone is talking about college applications. I’m just like

I guess I should at least apply to college too? Idk. What else would I do? So I applied for Radford, Longwood, Virginia Commonwealth, James Madison, and George Mason. I got into all of them except for JMU and GMU. GMU waitlisted me but I never heard back. I visit Radford, Longwood, and VCU. Radford was by far my favorite. The campus was beautiful! We visited in April I think, over my spring break my senior year. I fell in love with the campus and the town. I loved that you could walk from one end of campus to the other in fifteen to twenty minutes AND the University sits in the Appalachian mountains where, at the top of Jefferson street, reveals a horizon of mountains. This is where I wanted to be! At this point, I hadn’t a thought about what I would study. I simply knew this is where I could see myself living and studying for four years. The rest can be figured out later.