After Hayley Thagard graduated in 2015 from high school in Sabetha, Kansas, a small town near the Nebraska border, she was not ready to choose a career, or even a major. Community college made sense as a lower-cost, lower-risk choice to continue her education while she decided what she wanted to pursue.

Alexis Delgado, a junior biochemistry premed major at Avila University, spent her summer break a bit differently than most of her classmates – she was crunching MRI data in support of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Miami as part of a “research experience for undergraduates”, or REU.

Senior Grace Tibbetts studies emotions. Not just emotions, but how people recognize, interpret and act on those emotions. As a psychology major at Avila, her study of emotion recognition has shown her the rigor and reward provided by high-level academic research.