Sydney Dahle ‘21 earned bachelor's degrees in history and political science at Utah State University. She is from Lake Saint Louis, Missouri and attended Timberland High School. Sydney is the USU College of Engineering public relations specialist. Previously, she held the position of Cache County historian, creating an organizational system for the many, many documents buried in storage. Sydney worked as a political reporter for The Herald Journal, as the lifestyles content manager for The Utah Statesman, and currently serves as clerk for the Cache Valley League of Women Voters. In her free time, Sydney loves to paint, draw, and write, and she enjoys hanging out with her younger brother, who is attending USU.
The best decision I ever made was coming to Utah State, of course! As someone from out of state, I was the only student in my high school class going to USU, and I was really nervous about living on my own more than a thousand miles away. The first few semesters I cried and begged my mom to let me transfer, but by the spring semester of my sophomore year, I was loving USU and didn’t want to leave. I’m still here on campus, so I guess I still don’t want to leave!
The most useful thing I learned in college? How to read fast. I was being assigned 80-100 pages each night for reading, and no one has six hours to read all of that, so we were taught to read the first sentence and last sentence of each paragraph, and then, if it still wasn’t making sense, to go back and search for keywords that could help us remember information. I still use this today when I have to read those big, confusing engineering research papers.
I spent all my time in the Student Media office, either eating at my desk or sleeping on the sofa. It was an amazingly comfortable couch and definitely the best place to sleep on campus.
One piece of advice for my younger self: you don’t need to have everything figured out the second you toss your cap at graduation. At 18, I planned to become a history teacher, go back to Missouri, and teach at the high school I attended. By 2020, that plan had completely changed. I ended up majoring in history and political science with the idea of going to work in Washington. Although I did have a government job, I realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to do my whole life, and this was okay. 18-year-old Sydney would have never believed she’d be working in PR and marketing, much less living in Utah at 24.
I wish I had applied to be a CHaSS ambassador! I had no clue that was even a thing until after I graduated, and I’m so sad I missed out on getting to bring people to CHaSS! I think I’m pretty good at recruiting students to come to the College of Engineering now, though.😉
To help elevate the faculty who have authored books, Julia M. Gossard, associate dean of research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHaSS), created CHaSS Book Talks. This series invites faculty with recent publications to share their resea...
A new series was recently introduced to promote the creative work and research conducted in the college. The CHaSS Book Talk series was designed to help facilitate a more robust intellectual community among faculty, staff, and graduate students, centering...
