Don’t ask Jacob Nick what he most likes about PNW. The list gets pretty long.
“For me it’s a hard thing to pinpoint exactly,” said Nick, a junior History Education major. “From the moment I originally toured the school, I fell in love with its campus: the scenery, the buildings and especially the bell tower.
“I have also fallen in love with the professors, academic educators and advisors,” he said. “However, none of these things are my favorite about PNW – it’s a little more broad.”
Nick said the university enabled him to refocus his career choices.
“In seventh grade, I had a social sciences teacher that, for the first time in my life, made learning a new subject enjoyable. I loved that … and that continued to blossom well into my high school career,” he said. “During my junior year [in high school], I started to have a clash of interests between business and history, and at that time business won.
“I had settled on going to college as an accounting major, getting a job at some big firm, and spending my vacations on a beach somewhere warm,” said Nick. “But once I got to PNW, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted. After my first semester of taking business courses, I quickly realized it wasn’t for me and fell back to my reliable interest in history.”
That resulted in a major change in direction,
“I switched majors, and within my first week of that new semester, I had fallen in love with history all over again,” he said. “The professors I had made my education have meaning again. I looked forward to waking up and heading to class each morning.”
The passion for history was reinforced – in and out of the classroom.
“The classmates in those courses brought such wonderful ideas to me that had never even crossed my mind before,” Nick said. “Best of all, the homework actually piqued my interest and wasn’t simple, mindless work.
“Each and every history and education course I have taken has taught me so much,” he said. “None of this would’ve been achieved had it not been for PNW giving me the opportunity to pursue my true interest, my passion for history.”
