"I was never a number. I was a person"

I thrived in an arena where your professors took a personal interest in your development. The thing that sealed my decision to attend that school was being told as a freshman that I would be able to work with the television studio equipment and get a jump start on a career in broadcast journalism. Other schools would not allow me to jump into the studio until my junior year.

Campus life was just as nurturing. Despite being a commuter student, I spent much (or whatever word is more appropriate) time on campus because of the student body and the access to opportunities to work on my craft. It also did not hurt that by the time of my sophomore year I was hired by the Times-Picayune, which was located down the street from campus.

Besides learning the basic tenets of writing a story or editing video for production class, I learned valuable lessons in self-reliance, resiliency and service.

An example of that resiliency came nine years after I graduated from school when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. The campus, located minutes from Downtown New Orleans, was heavily damaged.

Instead of wallowing in the destruction, led by our legendary leader in our president, Dr. Norman C. Francis hit the streets in search of funding to re-build our institution. He travelled domestically and abroad to get the resources needed to continue the legacy of Katherine Drexel, our school’s founder.

Through Dr. Francis’ hustle, the campus re-opened within a year and today it is bigger and better than ever with a brand new chapel, new state-of-the art arena for our basketball teams and many, many other new buildings.

Xavier is the nation’s lone college institution that is Black and Catholic.

Xavier is known as the leader in sending the most African-Americans to medical school through its rigorous pre-med programs.

Xavier is a known as a leader in Pharmacy schools.

Xavier was not known for churning out journalists.

During the time I was roaming the Yard on campus I envied the number of resources the sciences were getting over the non-science schools. I felt the school was just taking our tuition dollars and funneling that money to the sciences while our equipment was not getting the needed updates.

There were times as a budding journalist that I butted heads with the administration over the provocative stories I wrote in the Xavier Herald, the student newspaper.

In fact, Dr. Francis and I had a battle over story coverage of the school in court over a university matter. When I walked into court with my assistant editor, Dr. Francis was shocked to see us sitting in the back of the room.

But the thing I respected about Dr. Francis and the tone he set on campus was he allowed for the students to express themselves and to show commitment to the disciplines we studied.

He might have disagreed with my argument that the science students were experimenting every day in the classroom, so we should not meet with such resistance when we wanted to experiment in the same way in the mass communications department.

Even though we felt we had a lacked attention and resources within our department, my classmates and I hustled to produce the best television shows and newspapers possible. The student newspaper became an Associated Collegiate Press Hall of Fame member.

Today, Xavier is not only a pillar of my hometown community of New Orleans, but its reach is worldwide because of the efforts of Dr. Francis.

We know this because of the overwhelming response to Dr. Francis, who retired as president in June after 47 years as our leader. His affiliation with Xavier began as 17-year old freshman in 1948. During his tenure he tripled enrollment and grew our endowment from $20 million to more than $160 million.

His commitment to service through his time at Xavier gave me the push to serve to make sure others can have a career in journalism such as the one I have today. For the past 13 years I have served as a board member of the Sports Journalism Institute, a program dedicated to bringing in more minorities and women in the sports media field.

In 2011, I became the president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), the largest organization for journalists of color in the world. One of my finest memories as president was when our association held its annual convention in New Orleans in 2012.

Dr. Francis hosted a reception in my honor on campus to laud my achievements. But more important to me was that Dr. Francis remembered all of the stops along my career and our battles on campus.

I was never a number. I was a person.

I was an Xavierite.

That meant the world to me because I will always remember why I chose to attend Xavier University of Louisiana.