When you know, you just know. That indescribable-yet-visceral notion of certainty is familiar for sophomore Chase Austin. He’s experienced it several times in his young life. Among the first was when he toured the College’s campus as an eighth grader. Something clicked, and he knew right away that this was where he’d go to college.
More recently – in the fall of 2020 – he had a similar gut-level epiphany. It was the first day of classes at CofC for this student in the Honors College.
“I was sitting in the intro to geology course,” recalls Austin, “and my professor [Vijay Vulava] mentioned that a new major in environmental geosciences would debut the following year. Even though I’d spent my senior year of high school in Germany and had been considering a path toward international studies, I knew right then that this was the major for me.”
Austin, who is also majoring in German, has long been passionate about environmental topics. As a youth growing up in Hollywood, South Carolina, he vividly remembers learning about the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
“I was barely 8 years old then,” he recalls. “I remember TV images of seabirds bathed in oil, the beaches and swamps decimated, dead birds everywhere, and people just stunned. It was horrifying, and I was so confused. How could something like this happen? Who would allow that?”
To learn more about Chase Austin’s environmental activism, check out the full article by Dan Dickison in the College Today.
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