My Flyer Family: Coming back home

I can’t remember the first time I visited the University of Dayton; the school has just always been a place I’ve known.

I was born here — down the street at Miami Valley Hospital — but I moved to Texas when I was 3 years old so my mom could be closer to her family in Mexico. My family and I would often come back to Dayton to visit my grandparents. On every single trip my dad, Sean Doll ’96, would say, “Let's go visit the University of Dayton. Let's go visit my alma mater.”

We visited again last fall as an unofficial college tour when I was deciding between UD and a community college back home in Texas. For me, it had always been Dayton until about my senior year of college when I began to realize that this is really happening and I needed to make a decision.

My dad made sure to show us the chapel where he and my mom got married. They met in Mexico at work, but my dad didn’t speak Spanish and my mom didn’t speak English. They fell in love, learned each other’s language and got married right here in Dayton.

After the trip down memory lane, I started wandering away from my family because it was so beautiful on campus in the fall. I took so many pictures to show my teachers. When I walk around campus now, I think back to that unofficial tour. 

I came back in January to do the official tour. After seeing campus in the wintertime, I realized that it was settled; I was going to be a Flyer. 

I found out that not only did my dad go to UD, but his dad, Gary Doll ’74,  did too. Being a Flyer was really a part of my identity as a kid, and I wanted to make my father proud by going to Dayton and becoming an engineer. I'm now a psychology major, so you can see that didn’t pan out exactly how I was expecting it, but I’m glad it didn’t because it gave me a chance to form my own identity while still going to UD.

Even though I’ve toured campus a dozen times, I am still learning how to navigate UD. The first semester of college has been non-stop, but I am working on building my community and discovering UD as an official — and proud third-generation — Flyer.  

As told to Zoë Hill ’22.