I attend an institution that holds thirty-thousand students. Of those 30,000, 3 percent of them are African-American.

The summer before my freshman year, I was fortunate enough to attend a five-week summer program called STARS. It allowed me to meet 20 other like-minded African American students and form friendships that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I didn’t realize, however, that the program was a microcosm, and that I was going to enter my first Fall semester completely dumbfounded as to how few of us there really are.

I will never forget my very first day of class. I walked in and sat in the front row as an obviously intimidated freshman. I was the only African American in a lecture class of over 150 people. The only one. When the professor began class, he made a joke in reference to the impossibility of remembering everyone’s name, but in the middle of his statement, he looked at me and said, “Well, I can probably remember yours.” I knew exactly what that meant. It was a joke to him, but it was a very isolated reality for me.

Countless students, friends, and family have asked me, "Why didn't you just go to an HBCU?" I've heard people go so far as to call student's who attend PWI's "sell outs" or "Uncle Toms." I wasn't aware that attending an HBCU was a necessary condition to be black.

There are numerous reasons black people choose to attend PWI's. Aside from obvious reasons like scholarship opportunity or money, some students simply don't want to be far away from home or perhaps there is a program that particularly sparks their interest. Regardless, it is completely unfair to assert that my blackness is somehow less than or diminished due to my decision to attend West Virginia University.

My experience here has been dichotomous. There were times where I was tempted to retreat to an HBCU, but I persevered. As a matter of fact, attending a PWI has given me a sense of pride in my blackness that I am not sure I would have otherwise acquired. Because of my immersion in such a homogenous campus community, I have developed a deep understanding of the importance of unity, community, self-determination and cooperative economics.

In a sea of people who do not look like me, I am not intimidated, I can seek out a community and we can all work together, black and white alike, to uplift the black community. I am inexhaustibly thankful for the experiences, good and bad, that I have gained here. My resume is stacked, I met the love of my life and I have been well prepared to enter the real world; I owe that to faculty, staff and students of WVU. Once a Mountaineer, always a Mountaineer.