Colin Smith, '19 BSE

My connection to Arizona State University began long before I ever stepped onto campus.

Nearly a century ago, my great-grandmother attended Tempe Normal School, an early predecessor of what would eventually become Arizona State University. Recently, I found her old yearbook. Inside are photographs of her and her classmates standing in front of Old Main, along with handwritten notes her classmates left for her throughout its pages. Holding that yearbook and seeing a version of the Tempe campus she knew nearly 100 years ago made our family's connection to ASU feel remarkably real.

Her time at Tempe Normal School began a family relationship with the university that has now stretched across four generations and, in many ways, mirrored the evolution of ASU itself.

That connection continued with my grandmother, who earned her master's degree in education from Arizona State University. Education became an important thread in our family story, and decades later, my wife continued that tradition when she graduated from ASU with her degree in education in 2020.

My wife's family brought another ASU tradition into our lives. For more than three decades, attending Sun Devil football games has been a regular part of their family experience. Long before my wife earned her own ASU degree, fall Saturdays in Tempe were already part of her family's connection to the university. Today, those traditions have come together-academic, professional and personal-across both sides of our family.

My own path at ASU took me in a different, but complementary, direction. In 2019, I graduated with a degree in construction engineering. While my grandmother and wife pursued education, I was drawn to the built environment-the schools, universities, civic spaces and other places where communities learn, work and grow.

Today, my relationship with ASU has come full circle in another way. I now teach within the Del E. Webb School of Construction, returning to the university not only as an alumnus, but as an instructor helping prepare the next generation of construction professionals.

Last year, my wife and I welcomed our daughter, adding a new generation to a family story that has been connected to ASU for nearly a century. She is still far too young to know what it means to be a Sun Devil, but she is already growing up surrounded by the traditions, stories and relationships that have made ASU such an important part of both sides of our family. Whether through football Saturdays, stories of her great-great-grandmother at Tempe Normal School, or visits to the campus where her parents studied, we hope to give her the same connection to ASU that has meant so much to us.

That is what makes our family's ASU story especially meaningful to me. The institution has changed tremendously since my great-grandmother stood with her classmates in front of Old Main in the 1920s, and our family has changed with it. Yet across generations, ASU has remained a place where members of our family have learned, taught, gathered and built lasting traditions.

There is something powerful about looking at those nearly century-old photographs of my great-grandmother on the Tempe campus and realizing that I now walk many of the same grounds as an alumnus and faculty member. What began with Tempe Normal School became Arizona State University, and what began with one member of our family grew into a multigenerational Sun Devil tradition that now extends across both my family and my wife's.
For me, being a Sun Devil is about more than where I earned my degree. It represents a connection between generations, between education and construction, between Arizona's past and its future, and between the opportunities one generation receives and those it helps create for the next.

Nearly a century after my great-grandmother began our family's journey at ASU, my wife and I now have the opportunity to share that tradition with our daughter. Maybe one day she will become the next Sun Devil in the family. Until then, she is already growing up as part of a story that began at Old Main generations before her.