Growing up in rural western Maryland, history alumnus Seth Sawyers ’99 couldn’t possibly have known what was in store for him — or how his world would expand — as a student at UMBC. Now a writing lecturer at UMBC, Sawyers shares some of those initial experiences in an essay appearing in The Morning News:

When I was 18, I left the skinny part of Maryland and woke up in a place paved over with asphalt, girded by concrete, nourished by it. I awoke fascinated by the mechanized hum, disoriented, wide-mouthed before the man-made angularity, the downtown steel visible from the top floor of the college library. I woke up that September in the middle of the great flowering of the American Dream. I woke up in the suburbs.

Read the full story here, and link to additional essays by Sawyers.