I remember my first day on the campus of Florida A&M University vividly. Friendly faces offering to help me and my mom move my things to the third floor of my dorm. Watching the Greeks stroll on The Set, one of FAMU’s main meeting places. Getting a home phone number from my first adviser, with the promise that she’d always be there if I needed her.
After that came the study groups, student organizations and professors who made you feel like you weren’t in the hunt for that degree alone.
That was 11 years ago.
In August, all those memories came flooding back when I was faced with the challenge of enrolling in a course through Hampton University’s virtual campus, HamptonU Online. What’s unique about Hampton’s program is its goal of transporting the HBCU experience online. As an HBCU alum, I was eager to see if HamptonU Online could come up with an experience that mirrored what I’d already been through.
With no face-to-face interaction, I knew it would be tough.
The school’s online portal has a virtual student center that puts students like me in touch with others who share my interests. There’s even a section for clubs—Greek-letter, athletic, political and social, among others—to allow me the chance to interact with others and give me more of a campus experience than I would get from an online-only institution.
The humanities course I took had the objective to “acquaint students with the thoughts, creations and actions of man reflected in selected literary, musical, dramatic and other creative productions of past and present in the fine arts and humanities.” Oh, boy.
