How I Got to Galveston
Little bits of fate in middle and high school put me on the trajectory to live and study in the island town.
We were not a Galveston family. I couldn’t tell you when I became aware of Galveston Island but it must have been at some point when I could read maps or perhaps when I learned about the 1900 hurricane that decimated the “Wall Street of the South”. As I said in my post from September, Nostalgic Thoughts from Bryan Beach, my family was a Rockport and Port A family. For summers on end, until we deviated a few times to Florida, we would pack up the family car, head south on I-35 until we got to Waco and then hop onto US 77 South for miles and miles. We knew we were inching closer when we passed Giddings, La Grange, Schulenberg, Hallettsville, and finally in Victoria we could almost smell the Gulf air. (I couldn’t tell you anything about the towns between Waco and Giddings, we were either sleeping or they were such small blips of farm towns they were ignored in my childhood mind.)
At some point, yes, I learned about Galveston. It was always the grungier, touristy Texas beach town in my mind, based upon recollections of what people had told me. Southeast Texas was not a place I even went to until I was 17. It was looking for colleges to attend that brought me to Galveston in the first place. By the time I was a senior in high school, well, really by the time I was 15, I was nearly 100% certain about what I wanted to major in and that was marine biology. I’d spent all of those years in Rockport, Port A, and the Florida coast pretending I was either a dolphin or an oceanographer and in my mind I was the female Jacques Cousteau everyone would know about by the time I was 30! (I did not know about Sylvia Earle at this time and didn’t even learn about her until *after* college! )
There were two universities I’d decided I wanted to attend by the time I was in late high school: Texas A&M University and Southwest Texas State University. The latter now goes by Texas State University, which I find somewhat unforgivable because it is too close to University of Texas for me, and yet I also don’t think San Marcos falls into the category of southwestern Texas, either. I digress…A&M was prominent in my mind because my 7th grade Life Science teacher had been from the coastal town of Ingleside, which is very near Port Aransas and Rockport and thus I had a strong mental connection to it, but she was also an Aggie. SWT came into play only because a then-friend and Subway coworker (one of my HS jobs), who was a year ahead of me in school, ended up going there and was also going to be an Aquatic Science major. A&M was still out there but by this time I was very familiar with A&M’s smaller campus, Texas A&M at Galveston (TAMUG).
In 8th grade, I took a class called Career Investigations. It was run by one of the English teachers and was one of my electives for a semester. We learned to write checks and balance a checkbook, wrote resumes, conducted mock interviews, and basically learned about careers with different guests coming in to speak to the class. We also had to conduct an interview with someone who was in our career field of choice, and since I knew at 13 I wanted to be an oceanographer I had to find someone in that field. There aren’t exactly a lot of oceanographers hanging out in DFW.
Now, this was all pre-internet, or at least the internet we know of today. I have no idea how my dad found this professor but he managed to get the contact info for a professor at TAMUG who was a marine biologist and I called him one evening to conduct my interview with him! I found this interview paper with his answers and honestly I had forgotten who this professor was and for years, when I recalled all of this, thought it might have been a professor I had at TAMUG. It makes sense though, because the professor I was thinking of and Dr. David Owens were both sea turtle biologists and researchers! Dr. Owens was not at TAMUG by the time I arrived in 1998 and it looks like he is now a Professor Emeritus at College of Charleston. You can hear him talk about his work with artificial imprinting on Kemp’s ridley sea turtles in this audio from the Texas Fauna Project.
From that interview on, A&M had transformed to TAMUG in my mind as the destination of choice for college. It was directly tied to the main campus which meant I would get to be an Aggie, get an A&M diploma, and of course, an Aggie ring. There was Texas A&M-Corpus Christi but it operated as part of the greater A&M University System and was an entirely separate school, much like Prairie View A&M or A&M-Commerce and several others. TAMUG was like if you broke a chunk of College Station off and plopped it down on Pelican Island and threw all of the maritime related degrees there. I liked that aspect—it wasn’t A&M but it was A&M.
In early fall of 1997, I filled out applications to both SWT and TAMUG but never finished sending in my recommendation letters to SWT. I had to go back and edit this paragraph a bit because I had to consult my high school diary, hoping it would provide some insight into this time period and clear up some long forgotten details. 17-year old Misti was good but not that good with writing down the details but I was pleased to see that I written down exactly when I had visited SWT and TAMUG. Apparently it was the same weekend. In an entry from October 15, 1997, we went to San Marcos on Friday October 9, 1997 and TAMUG on that Sunday and Monday, driving over from San Marcos I suppose on Saturday. I’ll spare you the photo of that entry because my handwriting is atrocious (some things never change) and the first few sentences have to do with a friendship fight between people I’m still friends with today. My diary tells me that situation didn’t even clear up until December, though there were ramifications from it for several years with one of the friends. What I wrote about that trip was:
“Went to SWT on Fri & TAMUG on Sun & Mon. I got ACCEPTED AT TAMUG! YEA!”
And then I proceeded to sign “Misti Whitlock PhD” twice! lolz 17 year-olds!
So, yeah, the reason I never sent in my SWT recommendations was because I got the early acceptance into TAMUG and considered the whole college thing settled. I remember my dad and I walking in to talk to the admissions counselor, probably just to talk about my application and make sure it looked good and that I didn’t need to do anything else, and she got the paperwork out, looked it over, and after a few minutes of conversation decided to accept me as one of the first students for the Class of 2002. I had to text my parents to get them to clarify that acceptance because my memory wants to say it was “the first” but it also wants to say it was like “the third”…but they also agreed it was “one of the first.” I mean, it has been 26 years.
Aside from the early acceptance, I knew at first sight that I wanted to live and study in Galveston. SWT was out the door as soon as I saw how close the ocean was, that it was a 10 minute drive from the dorms to a beach. Or if I really wanted, I could walk along broken oyster shells on a little area near the shipping channel, next to where the T/S Texas Clipper II was docked and across from the channel from a giant pile of sulphur. Campus was small, much smaller than SWT was, smaller than my high school. Two main class buildings with a smaller building for the engineers, a library that was tinier than my public library back home, a cafeteria and student center, three dorm buildings, and a swimming pool and rec center. It was just perfect.
Between acceptance and actually moving into the dorm there was: going to a campus preview weekend (staying in dorms, doing college things for a weekend as a senior in high school) in November 1997 and meeting my now-husband (another story for another time), high school graduation, and then sailing for two months on the T/S Texas Clipper II with the Texas Maritime Academy for a Summer School at Sea. And a whole lot of other background life happenings.
But that’s how I ended up in Galveston.
And no, I did not get that PhD.
More Galveston stories to come soon!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
I have been to Galveston, but I have always wanted to go to Port Aransas. Very interesting story, I can’t wait to hear more.
There's still time for the PhD!!! LOL