2024 UNT Great Grads Spring

Alessandra Murrey

Information Science

Alessandra has known she wanted to be a librarian since she took an aptitude test at age 13, and since, according to one of her middle school teachers, “opera singer is not a real career,” she says.

Even though opera singer is a real career, her belief when she was 13 turned out to be a great catalyst for her educational goals.

When she applied to UNT, she was originally actually interested in the Music program, but she changed her major to Information Science during orientation. “I learned about the University of North Texas from my history teacher, Mr. West, who went to UNT,” Alessandra says. “He nominated me as history student of the year when I was a sophomore in high school and wrote me a letter about how one day, I’d be an amazing librarian.”

Her love of the library, in part, came from volunteering. When her mother became a teacher, she had to drop Alessandra off at school early. The school librarian noticed her hanging around and asked her to help in the library instead of waiting outside. This was significant, as it provided an opportunity for her to finally be able to plug into a community. Community was something Alessandra hadn’t had before since she attended 16 different schools growing up because of her father’s work. “I didn’t have friends until I was ten, and even then, we kept in contact through email.”

 “I grew up all over, but in one of the towns I lived in, the only library was the high school library. A lot of people in my neighborhood didn’t have stable access to internet and so the library was important for their day-to-day lives, Alessandra says. “That’s one of the reasons small libraries have my heart.”

“My favorite part of working in libraries is when different people would come in, and how I could help them with resources,” she says. “There’s a certain satisfaction in finding a specific book without having all the information. Reference work is amazing. It’s like magic.” While at UNT, she also spent two years volunteering at the Denton Public Library.

But that’s not the only way Alessandra served her community. Denton Wesley Methodist Ministry, a church near campus, connected her with UNT’s food pantry – a service that provides food to students free of charge. “Most of my classes are online, so that experience was a way to get outside and talk to people.”

Once she started at UNT, it was a relief to finally be in one place. “I was surprised by how well I was doing in college. High school was so much more difficult, but by the time I got into college everything was making sense,” she says.

“I was worried about making friends in the Honors College. They kind of locked us in a room with each other for a week, but that’s how I met my partner and best friend,” Alessandra says.

Her second year of college was much harder. “Over the summer I worked at a summer camp. I thought it was a literacy camp, but it was basically a glorified day camp for low-income students.” Though the program was offered through a church, she faced discrimination. Coworkers called her slurs and she received multiple threats based on her sexuality. “It’s one thing when you feel like you don’t fit in, but it’s another thing when someone is threatening you.” When she started school that fall, she was still feeling the effects from the experience.

Unfortunately, Alessandra wasn’t able to find a place to live on campus during her second year. “I developed a stress disorder,” she says. “Not having easy access to dining halls made it harder to eat. Thankfully, I had amazing professors who were really supportive and helped me get through it — who gave me leniency on turning stuff in on time. And Counseling Services connected me with places that would take my insurance so I didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket.”

Despite her struggles, Alessandra is graduating from the Honors College after only three. “I had so many influential professors at my time at UNT,” Alessandra says. “Coming from the College of Information, I got to know a lot more faculty and counselors. There was a lot of one-on-one time. It felt more like a family.” 

Next, she’s headed to Simmons University in Boston, where she earned a substantial scholarship to get her master’s in Library and Information Science. “My main interest area is book banning and censorship. Some libraries are moving young adult books into the adult section. Some LGBTQ books aren’t properly logged in library catalogs — research is missing because it wasn’t tagged properly.”

For someone who spent so much time moving as a kid, she’s still a little nervous. “When I studied abroad in Ireland, it was just for a month. It was a finite thing, but this is the next two years of my life.”

But she’s still looking forward to it and getting prepared in whatever way she can. “Right now, I’m preparing for the cold, trying to collect things for the weather. And finding a place that’s OK with cats.”

 

Jason Pitts

Data Science

Jason Pitts describes himself as “a bit of a non-traditional student.” Although he didn’t start working towards his degree until 2018, his decision to delay wasn’t for the usual reasons. When he graduated high school in 2013, he earned a full scholarship to study music in the Dear School of Creative and Performing Arts at Northwestern State University in Louisiana. But after seeing that so many of his teachers and peers worked very hard in fields they cared about without ever making much money, he decided not to attend school for fear of losing his love of music.

Instead, he took up jobs in oil fields near his hometown of Marshall, Texas. He eventually moved to The Colony to live with a friend in the area in hopes of finding more options. He worked in food service and retail, but heading back to college was always on his mind: “I always wanted to go to college and do something, but I wasn’t sure what. I was working at Albertsons in Denton when I finally applied to UNT.”

Jason originally enrolled as a computer science major, but after two semesters, it didn’t feel like a good fit. His interest in creative writing led him to a double major in English and history.

“I got to study with really awesome professors. I like learning because any subject you get into has a depth you can’t see on the surface, and it’s hard to appreciate it before you work with someone who loves it,” Jason says. “In Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s class, I explored so much about the depths of poetry. And history has a convenient relationship with writing. Who doesn’t want to hear a cool story? I think everyone could use a little history.”

Unfortunately, Jason’s schedule didn’t allow him to continue with creative writing. He shifted instead to a Japanese major that he had already started on with his foreign language requirements. As he continued working through his classes, he stumbled upon UNT’s College of Information website and found the data science degree, which overlapped with his original major of computer science, but was more flexible.

“I’m pretty big on statistics. I like logic and answers to make sense of things that don’t make sense. I’ve learned things in math that applied to my creative writing. It’s those abstractions at a high level that make everything interesting,” he says, “Data science makes sense. I’m a system administrator for UNT, so I do programming, software deployment, security — pretty much anything businesswise or IT-wise, I’m involved with it. Looking at the course schedule, I was pretty familiar with it all.”

It wasn’t long before his coursework started to pay off at his day job. “I work with the Office of General Counsel a lot. I’m in class and we’re talking about archive and record management for evidence discovery, and then I get out of class and attorneys are asking me questions about stuff I’ve just covered,” Jason says. “I don’t know that a lot of people get to say they go to class and then right away they cover the same topic at work.”

Jason’s degree has been a long time coming, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy. “It’s been more difficult than I give it credit for, working full time here and going to school full time. People tell me I’m doing a lot, but I think I have an invisible stress that I don’t really realize sometimes,” he says. “Everyone at work has been great, they work with my schedule…it helps to work at the university. We always say students should come first.”

But earning this degree is only the beginning for Jason. During his last year in college, he managed to put together an audition for the College of Music and was accepted into the music program as a classical guitar student.

“Obviously, money is a thing you can’t ignore, but for me personally, you have to do whatever makes you happy — whatever that means at the time,” Jason says. “While you might not always have the resources, you have to try however you can.” 

While Jason is committed to becoming a life-long learner, that doesn’t mean he isn’t taking a moment to stop and celebrate. “I’m proud of getting an audition together in two months and getting into the College of Music,” he says. “I’m proud of graduating — I’m a first-generation student. I think it’s going to be an emotional commencement. I’m excited.”

Stories by Walker Smart