University of Dayton

Viewpoint

My story of coming to the University of Dayton is one of "in-betweenness." It began as most stories of your life begin: when you don't even realize that there is a story to be told. But it unfolds anyway before you realize that you are in the middle of it.

After I visited the campus, UD began to have that Goldilocks feel to it. Far away enough from my home in Cincinnati to be "on my own," but close enough that I wouldn't need a plane ride to return home for the holidays. Not too big but not too small either. A solid Catholic foundation cloaked in liberal inquisitiveness. Expensive but, hey, I had been offered a generous scholarship. It seemed like a good choice.

UD carried with it also some compromises that were not concessions. My four and one half years here proved to be an agreeable petri dish for the in-betweenness of my life then: leaving adolescence and stepping into adulthood; learning to be both a scholar and an artist; shedding organized religion but seeking a moral guidepost; advancing my own agenda but being sensitive to others; getting into and untangling myself from projects, promises, and the thousand daily decisions I was learning to make on my own.

This in-betweenness certainly has elements of uncertainty about it. After we graduate, are we prepared for the journeys that we take and are we aware of how completely novice we still are? What's important here is not that we answer these questions directly but that we acknowledge that we're part of a lifelong educational continuum that, for me, UD played an important role in.

Since UD I have remained in Dayton. While returning home from a business trip recently, I looked down below the plane and watched a large New England metropolis slowly give way to dark green forests and hills which gradually opened into the neatly cut, golden-brown farms of Ohio. Even inside the plane cabin I felt a sense of the open air below reaching out across all that flat land.

Our campus once resembled this farmland. The land has since been built up; young minds tilled and turned over. Since graduation, I have seen firsthand the important role in the larger community this institution has grown into. As if educating and preparing 6000 students each year were not noble enough, UD is also a supporter and mentor to additional community forces. Notably, it now has the opportunity to expand the campus while simultaneously reshaping a brownfield — not of the agricultural kind but of the environmental kind, regrettably left behind by others. I am proud of the University's efforts for this type of positive change.

UD was a wonderfully secure incubator in which to grow up, ask questions, think new thoughts, say stupid things and learn how to live with the consequences graciously. Some of the most intelligent people I know I met at UD. Friends came here from the East coast, friends moved on to the West coast. And Dayton sits here in between. It's a sweet city that is not too big (no traffic jams or long commutes) and not too small (everyone doesn't know your name or your story). Just on the edge of farms and high-tech industries, I can stay here for the peacefulness or easily take off on a vacation to see something different.

Looking back, I realize that my life and my story may still be "in between." And perhaps that is the metaphor that will always remain accurate. Do we ever really get where we're going and would we know if we had arrived?

Dayton is quiet enough to hear ourselves think these questions, to ponder, invent, and decode. For me it's quiet enough to write, design, and continue to work for a company that protects our water resources. Dayton is the right size where UD and its graduates can make a difference. Turns out that here is the sort of in between place that is the right place to be.

— Danielle Dumont '96

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