Eric Iberri, Editor in Chief
It was an exciting time in my life. I had been out of high school for three months and was living on my own. I lived at the dorms of UC Irvine. My major was information and computer science, and I chose the major based on my interest in computers, but it wasn’t my original choice. It soon became apparent that it wasn’t a good choice at all. A few weeks into classes, I realized I didn’t have the math skills necessary for computer science.
I was discouraged by my programming classes and no longer felt comfortable at the school. The classes were too hard, and the quarter went by too fast. I wanted to go to another school closer to home, to major in something closer to what I wanted to do.
I heard about the University of La Verne from a friend who looked at the school because of it’s college of law. I applied based on the small town atmosphere and small class sizes.
Once I was accepted for Spring 2004, I chose to major in journalism on a whim; it was writing intensive, something I was good at, and I thought it didn’t require a ton of reading. My first semester here was surprising. My English 110 class had less than 10 students in it. When I was at UC Irvine, my small class had roughly 60, and my large classes had over 250. To think that I’d know the names of each student in my class was exciting. I could walk right up to Professor Pell (who preferred to be called Steve) and ask him about an assignment.
This was more like it. It didn’t take 20 minutes to get from one class to another, and I was finally making some new friends. When I started taking journalism classes a year later, it was like meeting a new family. I saw familiar faces in every class. Each semester, I got to know my colleagues better as we progressed in our early journalism careers. Whether it was George shouting “Slant that line!” or Maia telling us to “Back the truck up,” we were in for the long haul, but we had each other.
The University of La Verne became a second home for me, as I spent most days in the Campus Times lab working on stories or watching Kevin Federline dance and sway to “PopoZao.”
It’s been a long ride and it’s been fun, challenging and frustrating. Here’s to everyone who survived three hours every Friday night in Eric Bishop’s Advanced News Reporting class, and to all students who can say they are products of the University of La Verne Communications Department.
—E.I.
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