What does it mean to suffer well? It’s a question most students don’t expect to wrestle with before their morning coffee, or in Skylar Reyna’s case, her morning tea. But for this graduating English major, that is the exact kind of question that makes HCU worth choosing.
Reyna is a Houston native with a stack of classics on her nightstand, a growing repertoire of home-cooked dishes, and an academic record that proves just what a liberal arts education can do.
Her story begins earlier than most.
Reyna’s first steps into an HCU classroom were in ninth grade through The Academy, the university’s dual-enrollment program modeled on the Honors College. A former homeschool student, she was drawn by its Socratic approach to great books.
The transition wasn’t without nerves, but she says “the warm community made me feel right at home.” Eight years later, she is finishing her final semester, a testament to how strongly that early experience took root.
Reyna is completing a Bachelor’s of Arts in English with a minor in History, alongside her membership in the Honors College. She initially weighed English, History, and Great Texts before recognizing her affinity for literature.
“I love the liberal arts,” she says, “and HCU’s curriculum invited me to draw connections from many areas of study.”
Her most formative course was Dr. Leachman’s medical humanities class on Russian literature, where Tolstoy and Dostoevsky became lenses for examining suffering, mortality, and love.
Reyna describes the course as an “invitation to wrestle with difficult topics about the human condition.” She doesn’t claim to have settled every question, but she has learned that inquiry itself is the point.
Reyna’s education extended well past the classroom. She served as President of HCU’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter, the international English honor society, and is a member of Alpha Chi Honor Society. Both strengthened her academic profile and opened doors to professional networking.
She also spent three summers as a student leader with Embark, a week-long Christian apologetics camp she first attended as a participant before her freshman year. Selected as one of eight student leaders the following summer, she facilitated small-group discussions and mentored younger students, which she calls “an experience I will cherish forever.”
Reyna plans to pursue a Master of Liberal Arts in Classical Education with a concentration in English, with the ultimate goal of teaching literature at a classical Christian school.
She credits HCU’s community with shaping not only her intellectual life but her character, noting that she is “more well-rounded than I was before.”
Ask Reyna what she’ll remember most, and the answer is less about transcripts and more about moments: late-night boba runs, last-minute study sessions with friends, and “the feeling of my brain getting rewired in honors discussion.”
Her message to future students balances honesty with encouragement. “College is hard,” she says, “but the people at HCU make it all worthwhile.”
