Celebrating a decade!

This spring marks a whole 10 years that have been lived since I first crossed paths with Jonathan Manz. A decade!! Because I like to reflect, I thought I'd take this season to do some walking down memory lane via the blog. Because J and I were first introduced online, it is pretty great to have a few snipits of our email dialogue archived that I can also access and smile.

So, the context:
Fall 2005
I was working in the admissions office at my alma mater, Warner Pacific College, in Portland, Oregon. I was exploring graduate schools to stay in the field of higher education and work in student affairs. All of the programs I had looked at early on did not require a GRE score for admission so I was not studying for that exam. My supervisor (and mentor) at the time, Shmackey, suggested I take a look at Baylor University's program because of their work with Strengths and she knew Eileen Hulmes who was just transitioning out of their VPSA role. Texas didn't feel to foreign because my Uncle and family were living in the DFW area which is an hour+ north of Waco. So I took a look over that winter break and loved what I saw built into the holistic curriculum of student development. But of course they required a GRE score and the application deadline was quickly approaching so I signed up to take that test and got my stuff in order.

February 2006
I was invited by Baylor's program to attend the interview weekend in Waco and meet with faculty as well as prospective graduate assistant supervisors. Unfortunately, the dates overlapped with a conference I would already be attending in Tulsa, OK for work about database software. Thankfully though, I was able to arrange my travel dates to extend my time in the middle of the country to loop down to Texas and back up before coming back home to Oregon. The Baylor folks were generous in letting me come to campus the following Monday after the rest of the potential cohort members had already participated in the weekend events. So while I was on campus late, I did not have a chance to meet any potential grad students.

???
My cohort friends will have to help me fill in the timeline here- late February? March 2006? we learned who was accepted into the program to begin Fall 2006. Emails began circulating with introductions of who we all were and where we were coming from. The group was pretty dominant with Texans and Baylor undergrads. But there was a small contingency of us others, relocating from out of state, who would be building a new community from scratch.