Taylor University

Date: Jan 20 2008
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
Some of the hardest years of my life were spent at Taylor University, but then again, I consider myself fairly atypical—more adept at mastering information than making friends even though I have very strong emotional needs. I had a difficult time trying to meld myself into the student body, which I found to be very cliquish and not accepting of those who hadn't already learned how to be "popular." Perhaps I rejected them before they rejected me. That said, I did end up meeting one of my best friends for life at Taylor. After nearly 10 years, I keep up with about 5 of my Taylor friends.

To be sure, the students at Taylor seemed more "spiritual" than their counterparts at Bethel College in St. Paul, MN, which I also attended for a year. But don't come to Taylor expecting to be warmly accepted just because it's a place with a lot of committed Christians. When I was going through a deep spiritual crisis, I found myself deserted by many of my friends, and alienated from my acquaintances. Perhaps I was just being too demanding of others, but I don't look upon the social aspects of Taylor too fondly. (Don't even get me started about the dating scene… let's just say that dating wasn't a reality for me until I started grad school at a state college, where the guys weren't afraid to ask me out.)

While overall I wasn't impressed with Taylor's academic rigor, I have nothing but good to say about the professors who were there between 1995 and 1999. I found them to be very intelligent, thoughtful, and willing to challenge the conservative upbringing of most of the student body. (I can only think of two or three of my professors who I would have considered to be Republicans.) Even though I would have considered most of the humanities professors to be liberal (perhaps a little too taken in by the prevailing attitudes of secular academia), they were still very faithful to orthodox Christianity. So they challenged me and perhaps the other students, most of us being upper middle class, conservative Evangelicals. I learned how to think much more critically than ever before, and I think it was more beneficial to me to be learning in a Christian context. Had I been at a non-Christian school, I would have merely dismissed my liberal professors as secular humanists and been unwilling to learn from their perspective. I'm still a Republican, but now a more thoughtful one who won't necessarily follow the party line on every issue, especially when certain policies favor the powerful to the detriment of those who have little say.

I know that God was guiding my time at Taylor, and I believe He will guide the journey of those who study at Taylor as well as other colleges. While I was very lonely at Taylor, I now attribute much of that to my own inadequacies at the time. I'm confident that my college experience turned out to be a difficult time only to prepare me for other trials in my lifetime, and Taylor happened to be a good proving ground for that.