Over spring break, I was lucky enough to spend my days competing at the 2024

Biennial Pi Kappa Delta Speech and Debate Competition and Convention. This took place at Glendale Community College, which looks like the set of any television show where the kids go to some kind of school for the gifted or artistically inclined.

While the focus of my stay was competing in varied speech and debate events (and surviving probably the world’s worst Premier Inns), it was hard not to admire the beauty of this school while I was scrambling to and from events.

The beautiful, green lawns surround almost every building, with multicolored beach chairs and countless green cacti. The sunny weather we were blessed with was enough to probably is what pushed it over the edge for me though. 

To my surprise, most of the classrooms lack inside hallways. Instead, each building has multiple doors that lead to the classrooms inside that they can get away with because, again, the weather is nice enough that you don’t need to wait indoors for classes. 

The fact that, if you can get just the right angle, you can see mountains in the distance is also pretty impressive to someone who’s never been farther west than Illinois in the past few years.

Throughout the competition, I blasted Shania Twain and referenced the hit CBS show “Survivor” anywhere I possibly could, all while meeting students from across the nation. I talked to a prospective law student from California who was impressed with the accessibility of all the buildings, something she told me she rarely saw back in her home state.

A journalism major from Utah said she were impressed with the faraway mountains while showing me pictures from her dorm window, that had the Rockies even closer. She appreciated the sunshine as well, and how every single building was simply labeled with what department was inside instead of random people she had never heard of. Her words, not mine (I like clarifying which Dolan I’m talking about). 

However, the closest friends I made were also the closest ones to JCU, from Bowling Green State University. As fellow Ohioans who were from teams of less than 7 people, we bonded over how beautiful this campus was and how it was so different from what we were used to.

Once I finally arrived back on JCU’s soil, which was thankfully not as cold as I expected, I found that I had a newfound appreciation for my home campus. I missed the familiar buildings and faces that I had been away from for the better part of two weeks, my dorm room and bed that I did not have to share with my duo partner and a general sense of home. 

Though I ended up representing Glendale Community College after some cold Phoenix nights forced me to buy a thankfully reasonably priced hoodie, a little part of my heart was sad as I was going to be a Blue Streak for the next year whether I liked it or not.