Featured Student: Faith Rider

Faith Rider, a Computer Science major whose first Honors Experiences centered on research and web development, did not expect the Northern Lights to change her life.

In Fall 2024, Rider embarked on a UHP study tour: a course on travel writing that included an end-of-semester study-abroad in Iceland. One moment of the trip left an indelible impression: the night when, after everyone in the class had “quietly accepted” that they weren’t going to see the Northern Lights, their bus driver and tour guide heard of a sighting at the last moment and, past midnight, took the entire group to a remote location where they could witness the aurora. Rider’s gratitude to Ivar and Erla, who went above and beyond for her whole class, “outweighed the magic of the lights themselves” and has stayed with her ever since.

Rider is the first to say that journalistic writing and photographing glaciers are experiences outside the usual scope of a Computer Science major. “That’s part of why it mattered so much,” she says, adding that “not everything has to justify itself professionally to be worth learning and remembering. Some things just become part of who you are.”