GERALD BLACKSHEAR / VN STAFF WRITER
In my four years at Detroit Mercy, I’ve witnessed and experienced a lot.
Even though I’m not far from home, the four years here have truly been an adventure.
I started off as a freshman in Shiple Hall.
Reflecting back on freshman year, it seems like every night was a wild night.
You’re a freshman finally away from home and you look for excitement. Most nights you can find something fun to do with your friends. I know I could at least.
After freshman year, you move out of Shiple into The Quads. You get your own shower (kind of) and you feel a little more independent.
Something I personally experienced from being in the basketball program was having to play for three different head coaches: Ray McCallum my freshman year, Bacari Alexander my sophomore and junior years and now current head coach Mike Davis.
They’ve all helped teach me different things throughout my career.
Detroit Mercy isn’t like most Division I schools.
It’s a smaller school, which gives it its own advantages and disadvantages.
One of the good things about Detroit Mercy is that there are rarely a hundred students in a classroom.
The classes usually range from about 10 to 20 students, and some classes have less.
Even though you can’t get away with missing class as easily as you could with more people in the class, I feel like it’s a huge advantage to have a smaller class size.
You can get closer and more personal with the professor.
This makes it easier to get extra help on assignments and to understand the content of the class better.
Another advantage of not having a huge school is you don’t ever have to travel far to get to anything on campus.
You can get anywhere you need to go in approximately five minutes.
Compare that to other schools where you’d have to ride a bike, take a bus or even drive miles to get to your class.
This puts less stress on you when preparing to leave because you only have to account for five minutes of travel time, instead of having to leave your room half an hour to an hour early.
One of the disadvantages of Detroit Mercy being a small school, at least from a social standpoint, is that everyone knows everyone.
Anything you say or do can get around the whole school in less than a day.
You also see all the same people every day, which can get pretty boring compared to seeing fresh faces every day.
