Clemson University nursing graduate Maggie Crowe grew up seven hours from Clemson by car in Ocala, Florida. Raised on her mother’s horse farm a short drive from the University of Florida, she spent her childhood attending UF football games and watching her siblings and friends attend the hometown school and thrive. She always just assumed that when the time came, she’d become a Gator.
One day, however, her little sister Sabrina made a comment that changed her perspective.
“The only reason you want to go to UF is because it’s safe,” Sabrina told her. “It will just be high school, part two.”
She challenged her to apply to just one out-of-state school and, “See what happens. College is about being uncomfortable and growing from it,” Maggie recalls.
Shortly after this conversation, Crowe met a student from Clemson, a school that had never been on her radar.
“The way she talked about the school was so contagious I immediately decided it would be the one ‘unordinary’ school I applied to,” says Crowe.
Crowe drove to Clemson on a rainy spring day to take a campus tour. Instead of saying Clemson would be the “best four years of your life” like she’d heard over and over at other schools, her tour guide explained that Clemson would be a slingshot into her future, where she’d be prepared for success and make friendships that would last much longer than four years. After that tour, she knew she wanted to be a Tiger.
She’d never lived away from home, so it was not an easy choice to pack up and go to a school where she knew no one. Clemson seemed like another world, but thanks to some classmates who quickly became friends, it started to feel like home after a few short weeks.
Then, a sneeze in biology class sealed the deal.
“I remember being so overwhelmed initially because the lecture seated 250 students,” says Crowe. She decided to attend office hours with the professor, senior lecturer Nora Espinoza, to see if it would make the classroom feel less overwhelming, and it did. Crowe says she felt valued and “seen” after just one session.
“The next day in class, we were sitting in that large lecture hall, and I actually sneezed,” Crowe recalls. “Dr. E looked directly at me and said, ‘Bless you, Maggie.’ All my friends gasped and laughed, saying it was crazy that she knew who I was in the first few weeks of school in such a large class. Although I was slightly embarrassed at the moment, I look back and am so grateful. Dr. E is the pure example of the Clemson Family.”
Crowe went on to make the most of her college experience, becoming a campus tour guide, director of Tigerama, and joining the honors college, to name a few examples. She switched majors from prepharmacy to nursing once she understood the opportunities for advancement that nursing offers and how nurses can directly promote health education to their patients.
“I believe that nurses have the potential not only to help treat symptoms of a condition but also to prevent further health issues from occurring and promote a healthier society.”
Crowe says her biggest takeaway by far from her time at Clemson will be the friends she made, just as her tour guide predicted more than four years ago.
“Four and a half years ago, I knew nobody on this campus. And now, as I graduate, I get to reflect on how the people I met in Clemson have changed me forever,” she says. “The friendships Clemson has brought me are unmatched; I have never felt more supported and loved than by the people this small college town has brought me.
“A large part of my ambition to chase dreams and goals comes from knowing I have the best support system from my college community, and I will never be able to get over my gratefulness for that.”
After graduation Crowe will move to Greenville, where she plans to start her nursing career on the ICU floor of St. Francis Hospital.
“And,” she says, “immediately join the Clemson alumni association club in that area!”