The first time I visited Texas A&M with my mother, I sat in a tiny old building learning about opportunities to get plugged-in on campus. Before the recruiter started her well-worn and well-loved speech, she asked each of us around the room where we had come from to visit campus. She was looking for the individual who had come the farthest and was going to reward them with an old-fashioned plastic water bottle with “Liberal Arts” painted on the side in big, white letters. People from around the room started to pipe up “Dallas!” “Just Houston...” “I came all the way from San Antonio!!” The babble diminished for a moment as the recruiter took it all in. San Antonio seemed to be the winner until she said this: “Did anyone come from anywhere outside of Texas?” I raised my hand and looked around, shrinking it back down as I realized I was the only “out-of-state kid” in the room. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Oklahoma. Tulsa.” Regardless of if my fellow prospective students knew precisely where this was or not was beside the point. They were all just impressed I wasn’t from Texas. “Well, it looks like we have a winner then. For coming the farthest, all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Come grab your prize!”
 
The next year as an incoming engineering freshman, I never used that water bottle. I put it in the “stays in Oklahoma” stack when I packed for school. I was a future engineer, what did I need a Liberal Arts water bottle for?  
 
That was over six years ago. Now, as I begin to work on my penultimate degree, my official documents all look something like this: Delaney Couri, Ph.D. program in Communication, College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University. As I enter my Ph.D. program, I no longer come from the farthest location. In fact, I’m the resident Bryan/College Station guru, the go-to for questions about the town that I have now called home for over half a decade. No, I may not have come the farthest in terms of distance, but looking back at my life journey, I would say I have come pretty far. From engineer, to teacher, to potential rhetorician. Alone, scared, and mentally unhealthy, to supported, invigorated, and growing. Coming from the farthest all those years ago was a daunting experience, and even now, I know I have even further to go. And yet, I couldn’t be happier.
 
– Delaney Couri
 
Delaney is a first-year Ph.D. student in the College of Liberal Arts.