Featured Student: Audrey Baker

Audrey Baker wasn’t sure at first how the UHP would fit into her plan to graduate from UC in three years, with a double major in English and Psychology. But, through Honors Experiences focused on literary publishing, collaborative storytelling, and communication, she discovered that the program’s offerings “pushed me out of my comfort zone to achieve my full potential as a leader and a creative in ways that I never would have discovered otherwise.”

It was in Tales of Resilience, a UHP signature experience that assembles small, student-facilitated groups to play through a semester-long D&D adventure together, that Baker, a longtime fiction writer who was more than a little nervous about sharing creative control, found enduring lessons. “Sharing a world with other people, whether fictional or otherwise, is a collaborative experience in which we do not have full control,” Baker says; that shared experience of storytelling and character development became a living demonstration of “all the good that can come from being a part of something greater than yourself.”

Baker hopes to take those lessons forward as she explores potential career paths in psychology and the fields of editing and publishing. “You'd be surprised how much all different types of abilities are transferrable in life,” she says: “how one experience leads you to be more proficient in another, or how that one skill you thought was going to be unusable ends up differentiating you in a later opportunity.”