Now, nearly 8 years later, I will finally start my senior year at OU. I feel that I’ve come far in life, learned a lot, and grown a lot. Despite this progression I know I still have more to learn and more growing to do. All during this time of growth the clock tower has stood ticking away and counting down until the time I walk beneath it to graduate, and all the time after it will continue to count. My life will change and I may move away from Oklahoma, but OU will remain here and with it a monument to my personal growth and struggles as a student and as a man. I will forever remember the clock tower, a starting place, an ending place, and everything in between and beyond for my life.

Now, years later, I’m back walking the paths of OU and attending class in its halls. From time to time I will pass the clock tower and be reminded of where I started many years ago. At the same time I am reminded of where I am going. In the time since leaving OU in 2014, I have enlisted into the military, traveled across the country for training and leisure, and deployed around the world. I have found friendship, love, marriage, and new family. I have completed two Associates degrees (one from OCCC and one from the Community College of the Air Force), repaired my OU GPA, and now find myself less than a year from completing the bachelors that I set out to get in 2013. All along this journey, the OU Clock Tower keeps ticking, I think for me it is counting down, down to the moment I and many others walk under it for the first and last time on the way to graduation.

For a few years after 2014 I was not considered an OU student. I made poor decisions and failed one too many classes as a freshman and sophomore, and found myself with a suspension for poor academic scholarship. In the interim I enrolled at OCCC to try and correct my mistakes. I still lived nearby OU campus, and would sometimes walk to campus and wander it in the evenings to clear my head. Many times I would come back to the OU Clock Tower and be reminded of why I ever moved to Oklahoma in the first place. Despite the fact that I would never graduate within 4 years of starting classes, I still chose not to walk under the tower itself. I would save that for a special occasion, because I wasn’t going to give up on my goal despite my self-induced setback.

I first saw the OU clock tower in 2013 during a tour of the OU campus. Like many prospective students, it was relayed to us the superstition that those who walk under the clock tower will not graduate in 4 years. At the same time as our tour guide was telling us this, another student bolted under the clock tower, much to her dismay. I remember that day every time I walk by the clock tower and reflect on how my life was going to be much different a lot sooner than I expected. Though I never walked under the clock tower, I would not be graduating in four years.