“I was able to get an internship through PEOPLE working with animals,” Thornton said. “I got to work at VES in Middleton, Veterinary Emergency Services. I spent about a month shadowing the positions there to see what it was like to work with animals and lots of them in that environment. At the time, I knew I just wanted to work with animals. I feel that experience pushed me away from that because it’s really kind of sad. It was sad coming into this internship and then having to see these animals die in front of me. It was something I didn’t want to do, but I have always appreciated the experience for getting me connected with the people who work there. I hit them up every once in a while to ask them for guidance.”

Thornton applied to and was accepted by UW-Madison and entered the university in the fall of 2019 as a PEOPLE Scholar with an undecided major.

At first the experience was wonderful beginning with the summer of 2019.

“Once I got to college, I came through SCE, the Summer Collegiate Experience, and met a lot of great people from other DDEEA Programs such as First Wave and CAE even though it isn’t DDEEA,” Thornton said. “I met a bunch of people from there. Freshman year, first semester was great. I really built up a community I knew. Luckily I had people I knew since high school from the PEOPLE Program.”

But by March of 2020, that collegiate experience abruptly changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the university closed its physical doors as the students were on spring break.

“I was back in Milwaukee from basically that spring break until August move-in where I came back and had an apartment,” Thornton said. “I pretty much did school on-line for that year. Looking back on it, that whole sophomore year just kind of came and went. I felt there were a lot of things going on outside and inside of my life. It was just like you had the whole pandemic. You had a lot of protests going on over the death of George Floyd. There was all kinds of things going on. That whole year feels like a blur. When we came back junior year, I started making it to organized stuff on campus and getting a feel for campus. But I feel like this is the one year that kind of felt as close to normal as it did my freshman year. I really appreciated that.”

While Thornton came to UW-Madison with an undeclared major, he declared zoology to be his major because it had to do with animals, but it was more researched focused.

“In my time here, I directed my classes more towards evolutionary biology,” Thornton said. “I took a lot of classes on evolutionary processes, and expressive extinction. One of my favorite classes was this class with Scott Hartman about dinosaurs. I feel like that class perfectly encapsulated what zoology is to me. We learned about different evolutionary processes that led to dinosaurs and how different ecological, physiological and other processes affected their rise and how we can learn from different samples of the times such as rock samples or water samples from Antarctica about the climate and how we can use that information to extrapolate information about dinosaurs’ lifestyles. It had less with helping animals and more just learning about animals. I have always been more interested in the learning.”

Thornton looks back at his UW-Madison experience with mixed feelings.

“PEOPLE was a good support system,” Thornton said. “I really don’t know where I would be without it. There is the tuition, which is an amazing support. If I didn’t have that, I probably wouldn’t have gone to school here. The family I made was important. My mentor has been a great help in getting me ready for life outside of school. Even the summer programming when I wasn’t a student, I met all of these teachers who come to teach all of these students and even ones who taught me when I was a student, they’re like, ‘Oh, I remember when you were like a 17-year-old and I am happy to see where you have gone.’ I shoot them an email every once in a while just to keep the correspondence going. It’s an amazing support.”

But once one moves beyond that bubble of family, UW-Madison became a different place for Thornton.

“Speaking for my academic experience, I feel like that was pretty good too,” Thornton said. “I think the best experience is just the people you meet. It’s the people who make the experience. School outside my program has been ‘ehh.’ Yeah I’m a student here. They usually give me what I need. I feel like I kind of got lost in a sea of people. I feel after the pandemic that got worse. I feel outside of the people you know and the classes you take, it’s just been on my own path.”

UW-Madison is a large campus that can be overwhelming to any student. But being Black on a predominantly white campus has its own challenges.

“I’m biracial,” Thornton said. “When people see me and my skin color, it’s not as dark as some of my friends. I would say because of that, I probably experienced less overt forms. It’s been much more micro-aggressions. I know just in general, just being a student, especially being a student from Milwaukee, coming to campus, you just feel you are here because you’ve been brought here. Just moving through classes and people almost discrediting you because ‘you haven’t put the work in to be there.’ That comes up a lot, specifically in certain fields like business and engineering.”

Next issue: UW-Madison experiences and the future