Who I Am #2

I headed off to Texas for my freshman year at Baylor and it was HARD! Leaving Colorado, close friendships, and the shelter of a small Christian school shook me up. Thank goodness I didn’t go to a state school because the culture shock at this large “Baptist” university was plenty! My roommate (and many girls on my hall) came home stumbling drunk all the time. In fact, my roommate was required to go to AA meetings a couple weeks into the semester because she had received so many tickets for being a minor in possession of alcohol. People cussed, smoked, slept around, partied - it was a whole new, scary world. I remember the first semester hating it and seriously considering transferring for the spring semester. The only thing that kept me there was my confidence in the fact that it was God who led me to Baylor whether I could see why or not.

I didn’t have a car and didn’t know anyone so it was super scary to try and find a place to fit in. I went to every group, club, or meeting I thought might be a fit and was way out of my introverted comfort zone! Thankfully I finally got hooked up with Campus Crusade and joined a small group there that became a lifeline for me in those early years. I still remember standing in the parking lot waiting to go to the Campus Crusade fall retreat, not knowing a soul and just having to walk up to a random person and ask if I could ride with them. It was a scary but necessary weekend.

Thanks to the fact that I had starting making some friends I headed back to Baylor for the spring semester of my freshman year and can still vividly remember walking up the stairs in my dorm one day after class and thinking “I’m okay, I like it here” God is always faithful! School was busy but fairly easy my first two years as I worked through some pretty intense schedules to try and stay on track to graduate in 4 years with an engineering degree (typically the program took 4 ½ - 5 years to complete).

(my awesome roomies, Paige and Regan, I met Paige freshman year and lived with her for the next 3 years. Regan lived with us junior and senior year)

The summer after my sophomore year I went to Europe for six weeks on a study abroad program – loved it! We attended the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands and traveled all over western Europe on the weekends.

Every holiday and summer I went back home to Colorado and spent time with my close group of friends from high school. Those friendships went deep during the high school years and it was awesome to be able to meet back up with everyone every couple months, catch up on each other’s lives and pick up right back where we left off.

School got increasingly harder and harder as time went on and I spent more and more time studying and less time doing anything else. By my spring semester junior year I hit a whole new level academically. I was in the library day and night working my butt off and by mid-terms I had 3 D’s and an F! It rocked me to work so hard at school and not be succeeding – school had always been pretty easy for me. It was really humbling for me to see firsthand how much smarter many of my classmates were and how much easier this stuff came to them. Thankfully by this point I was taking mostly engineering classes so class sizes were smaller and for the most part I had a consistent group of people in all my classes. I still believe I owe much of my degree to hours of study groups with those guys and their willingness to explain things to me over and over that didn’t seem that complicated to them.

That same spring semester my junior year Logan moved from Colorado to Houston – 2 ½ hours from Baylor. He stopped by to visit on his trip down and we stayed in touch until the summer. At the time it didn’t seem strange to me since he was part of our close group of high school friends I saw every time I went home and the only one to move that close to me in Texas. Little did I know that before he left Colorado he had sat down with my parents and asked for their blessing to start dating me!

We both went back to Colorado at the end of May (me for the summer and Logan for a wedding) and hung out with friends as we always did. The night before he left to go back to Houston Logan asked if I would have breakfast with him the next morning, I thought that was a little fishy but agreed. The next morning we went and picked up McDonald’s and went to the park by my parent’s house. We talked for a bit then it became obvious to me where the conversation was headed. I was completely ready to tell him I wasn’t interested in dating him and after the semester I just had at school I didn’t see how I would be able to maintain a long-distance relationship anyway. Logan talked about how he wasn’t interested in just dating but that he wanted to “pursue the possibility of a future together” and he told me he didn’t want me to answer then but to just promise that I would spend some time praying about it and let him know. Smart move! It seemed heartless to say I wouldn’t at least pray about it so I agreed and Logan headed back to Houston.

I spent the next week praying about a potential relationship with Logan and God definitely turned me heart around. Thank goodness I didn’t say no that day! I emailed Logan at the end of the week that I would be interested in pursuing a relationship but also strongly cautioned him of how busy I was with school and how little time I’d have for him – ha, that's encouraging!

Senior year flew by, classes felt a little bit easier and the end was in sight! In January Logan moved to Nashville so our slightly long-distance relationship became even longer distance! It was so hard but I’m really thankful that we were long-distance for quite awhile because it meant that all we could really do was talk on the phone – there was no going to see a movie, hanging out with friends, just killing time and we really got to know each other well by all the hours spent just talking.

(visiting Logan in Nashville)

Toward the end of college I was really starting to doubt whether engineering was the right fit for me at all. I was close enough to smell graduation but starting to realize that I didn’t really like what I was doing nor was I passionate about the kind of career I saw before me. It didn’t really matter anymore that people were impressed when I told them my major or that I wanted to be seen as one of the “smart kids”. Sure God gave me some left-brained, math/science abilities but just because you’re capable of something does that mean that’s what God has planned for you? At that point the only obvious choice was to finish it out and then see where God would lead me. Somehow I stayed on track and graduated in May 2003 with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering – what a relief that day was!!

Now it was off to join the “real world”….