As a sophomore transfer to UND this year, I’ve realized that I think I have a weird perspective on UND and college in general.

I’m from Grand Forks, so I’m obviously comfortable with the town, and I’ve been pretty familiar with campus related activities – especially sports – since I was little. But I took my first year of college in Los Angeles, a city which I’ve decided is literally the farthest place away from North Dakota as you can get; I don’t care what maps say.

So during my freshman year, I learned a lot about college and independence and what-not, so I’m not new to that, but I’m definitely still new to UND’s campus. Even after the first two weeks of class, I still feel the need to glance at my class schedule from time to time to make sure I’m setting my alarm for the right time each morning.

At the University of Southern California where I went last year, what I was most impressed by was this permeating sense of exhilaration. Everywhere I looked, there was a group of students doing insane physics projects or some kid with a camera lining up a row of trees for a shot in his short film or a couple of dental students running to lunch in their scrubs.

It was exciting. It was non-stop. It was a giant beehive, and we students and professors were gathering information and building things together. It was awesome.

When I decided that I didn’t want to study at USC’s film school, I decided to get out (and stop paying the bills there). I was happy with my decision, of course, but my biggest worry was that that pulsing sense of excitement and movement that I knew at USC wouldn’t be waiting for me at UND.

Yet despite knowing that my parents’ house is only a few miles away, our campus really does feel like it’s own world. When I’m north of Demers – when I cross those train tracks – Grand Forks transforms into a place I have never been to before.

The atmosphere took me way off guard – primarily because it actually did remind me of USC in many ways. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not mistaking the _______ for ______, and I’m definitely not seeing palm trees growing outside my classrooms as I did in LA.

But, while walking down Princeton Street this morning, it occurred to me that that sense of exhilaration – that feeling that everyone around me is here to learn and discover – that feeling was still there.

So you don’t need weekly celebrity campus visits or trillion-dollar film programs to make a good university. I think you just need a plot of land with cool young people living on it. And I think we’ve got that here at UND.