People of UCA

By Payton Turner
Staff Writer

Freshman or Junior? Freshman student will rocket ahead to junior status next semester

with 52 hours of college credit already obtained during her time in high school.

Bianca Bautista, a jill-of-all-trades freshman who balances twelve hours of nursing and

psychology classes with iDEAL, the Big Event Committee, nine hours of practice with the Bear

Marching Band every week, and work at Starbucks. Bianca, while only in her first year of

college has already accumulated at least 52 hours from concurrent credit during her time at

DeKalb High School in her hometown of DeKalb, Texas.

My school didnt do AP and all that hooblah, we just did dual credit. So every single

class I took last year, except for my band class and my computer programming class was college

credit. Even now Bautista is rocking a 3.25 GPA with her classes.

And shes definitely not done yet. Next semester, Bautista has aspires to become a peer

coach in her residential college, Health Promotion and Wellness- better known to the UCA

campus as HPaW. Peer coaches are students who are constantly available for other students to

receive assistance and improve their academic standpoint. Peer coaches typically help students

who are on academic probation or alert. She also plans to apply for the Honors College in

January.

When asked what she hopes to gain and what she loves in all of these different

organizations she responded with I love the idea of becoming a better leader. I love helping

others and I only want to improve my people skills and learn about others.

Though Bautista, who is an aspiring vegetarian, laments that there are so few vegetarian

options offered at UCA, specifically at the cafeteria. They dont serve enough food that has
enough iron in it which has made me anemic and everything that have thats vegetarian is all

carbs, so its not easy to eat healthy.

Bautista originally began her journey here at UCA because the moment she stepped on

campus she fell in love. The beauty of UCAs campus had her enraptured from the get go, and

she knew immediately that this was where she belonged. Shed already known that UCA had a

fantastic nursing and psychology programs, her major and minor respectively. UCAs really

great about diversity, which is another reason she decided on UCA.

Bautista, contrary to many upperclassmen, also enjoys that she lives on campus and

doesnt constantly have to compete for a parking spot and is within walking distance of all of her

classes, all of which she enjoys immensely. I love all of my professors, theyre great.

She loves and looks forward to all of the opportunities to get involved across campus and

loves to see everything that UCA has to offer. Im taking a full load but Im still in band and

doing a lot of things outside of school Bautista said. Theres just so much to do at UCA. Shes

also very excited for the Conway Corporation Center for Sciences to open to students.