As a kid, fall Saturdays meant one thing: Notre Dame football. I have vivid memories of watching games with my dad and brothers and the yearly pilgrimage to South Bend to watch the Irish in person. We’d criss-cross campus, tossing a football on the quads, with my dad inevitably introducing us to someone he went to school with while he was there during his undergrad or law school years.
Notre Dame is truly in my blood; I’m from a large Midwest Catholic family and my grandparents sent five of their six children to either Saint Mary’s or Notre Dame. It was an unspoken family rule that the grandchildren had to apply to ND. It’s a school that has always felt like family and home to me.
Going to Notre Dame was the fulfillment of my childhood dreams. I grew up in so many ways there. I learned how important my faith was to me and made incredible friends who supported me through thick and thin, with memories that will remain forever. It was absolutely everything I could have wanted from my college experience.
I started my engineering job soon after graduating in May 2022. That job included graduate school after my first year, and as I started my search, one school stood out: Texas A&M University.
Come August 2023, I found myself driving cross-country to College Station, Texas to start my master’s in aerospace engineering, having never set foot on campus and not knowing a soul. I was awed by the sheer size of the school, with over 75,000 students. The graduate school alone is larger than Notre Dame’s entire student population. I was concerned about the difficulty of graduate engineering classes as well as not knowing any professors or other students. And yet, there was a familiarity about it that I couldn’t put my finger on.
On my first full day in Aggieland, I went to Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and felt a sense of God’s peace telling me that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And boy was he right! Again I found myself in a place that pushed me toward excellence, forming deep friendships with some of the coolest people, and I fully immersed myself in the Aggie culture.
And I came to understand why a massive public university in central Texas felt so similar to a mid-sized Catholic school in northern Indiana. Both A&M and ND are institutions that place priority on the mission of forming students in both academics and as better people. The Aggie core values and the Notre Dame mission both speak of service, loyalty, striving to be the best you can be and putting others before yourself. These values seep into the fabric of both schools and encourage students to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Both schools boast impressive alumni networks, keeping their former students connected long after leaving College Station or South Bend. There’s the traditions that don’t make sense to anyone on the outside looking in (midnight yell or drummer’s circle, anyone?). And of course, there’s the football aspect.
This weekend, just as I did last year at Kyle Field, I get to celebrate the two schools that made me who I am as they meet on the gridiron. I get to introduce family and friends from all over the country to each other and show my Aggies around the house that Knute built. Don’t worry, Irish fans — I’ll be in my blue and gold, of course! But I’ll also be proudly wearing my Aggie Ring. Because whether I was welcomed as a long-awaited friend or as a complete stranger, both Notre Dame and Texas A&M changed me for the better, and I will be forever grateful.
Anna Burger
Class of 2022
Sept. 8
