Why Clemson?
This is a question many of us have had to answer over and over again, whether to our teachers in high school, friends, or family members at our graduation parties. It is a question that we all have had to ask ourselves at one point. I remember sitting down at my computer during the end of my junior year of high school, having to think about where I wanted to spend the next four years of my life, where I wanted to earn a degree from, and what I wanted to do after college graduation. I remember how scary, but exciting, the whole process was. We have all been there and asked ourselves the same question -- why Clemson?
Did we choose Clemson because U.S. News & World Report ranked us in the Top 20 Public Universities in 2014? Is it that Clemson offers over 80 majors, 75 minors, and 110 graduate programs? Did we choose Clemson because we wanted to be one of the 1,000 students Clemson sends abroad each year? Or did we choose Clemson because we have the best 25 seconds in all of college football, were voted fourth for Best Tailgating Experience by Total Frat Move, and because nothing says game day better than a Jet Fuel at Larry’s? Hell, yeah, those are the reasons we chose Clemson -- at least to begin with. But those are not the reasons we chose to stay.
Clemson is more than a top ranked university with the typical college football experience. Clemson is a school that honors integrity, honesty and respect and holds it’s students to value the same principles. We are a school that values traditions; whether it is spending a warm and sunny spring afternoon on Bowman field with our friends, getting the chills as we hear cannons fire and Tiger Rag play while we watch our Tigers run down The Hill before a football game, or seeing a 75 year old Clemson alum wear orange on a fall Friday with the same Clemson ring on their finger as we have. We are a school with traditions, and we look forward to seeing these same traditions continue years after we have grown-up and graduated.
We are more than just statistics and football games. We are more than Greek life, drinking downtown, and spending long summer days out on the lake. Clemson is a place where teachers become mentors, friends become family, and a school becomes a home. Clemson is a place we will all return to years after we have graduated to watch our Tigers beat the Gamecocks. We will encourage our kids to come here, and not just for a great education, but also for the same college experience that we are all lucky to have had.
Clemson is a place where traditions and legacies live on for years to come, and a place that we will all hold near and dear to our hearts. Joe Sherman, Class of 1934, said it best when he wrote, “There’s something in these hills that has bound together a man of over ninety and a boy under twenty, something that has given them a common ground on which to stand and a start toward bridging, and eliminating, and gap or any stress or any strain that might try to make unglued whatever they seek for themselves as they move out of these hills into the mountains, the plains, the oceans, the forests, the skies and the storms of life.”
Clemson is Clemson. From the outside looking in, you cannot understand it. But from the inside looking out, you cannot explain it.
