As the Falcon Alumni Network (FAN) president, the University of Texas Permian Basin’s (UTPB) alumni association, Cassandra Wilcox recently urged her fellow alums to find their way to give back to the university.
Wilcox received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UTPB from 2007 to 2013, and in a recent post to the university’s website, she said she first joined FAN to try to give back.
“I never thought I would be president,” Wilcox wrote in her October post. “All I wanted was to do my part to help UTPB grow and help the current Falcons succeed. It has been exciting to see how the university has grown since I left seven years ago, and I can see the excitement in the faculty, staff, and students when they talk about the steps ahead.”
From her first night as an undergraduate with a cold, unable to buy anything more than cough drops and Kleenex due to being 17, Wilcox said that what stood out to her even then was the community at UTPB. As a brand new member of the swim team, her teammates checked in with her all that night and got her what she needed.
“This is when I knew that choosing UTPB was the right decision,” Wilcox wrote in her post. “I already knew I liked the dorms and the smaller class sizes, but the scariest thing about college is making new friends. Finding a group or team on campus made that easier.”
After six years at the university, Wilcox still found the community welcoming and decided she wanted to be a part of it, choosing to remain in Odessa, she wrote.
“This was one of the best decisions I have made so far,” she wrote. The opportunities that Odessa has offered me range anywhere from getting to travel the nation for work and getting to dive into the community by joining different types of organizations.”
But even for those who did move away, Wilcox urged them to give back to the university as alumni.
“The UTPB we attended a decade ago was improved by the impact of the alumni before us, and we can make an impact of the Falcons of the future,” she wrote.