Pine Mountain, Georgia, is a town in the middle of nowhere with a population smaller than Union University’s campus. Other than hiking the mountain from which the town’s name is derived, the next biggest attraction is the Kentucky Fried Chicken that’s attached to a gas station along Highway 27. In this tiny town, across from that KFC, lies the campus of a gap-year program called Impact 360.
Impact 360 is a nine-month gap-year program that teaches a handful of high school graduates how to maintain their faith in college and be leaders in their communities. The students there also happen to receive credit from Union, which explains why you probably know someone on campus who attended it.
Two of those people are Nehemiah Guinn, sophomore philosophy and accounting double major, and Carson Cook, sophomore pharmacy major. Much like the town it’s based in, Impact is very small.
“I underestimated coming from such a small community and coming to a place much larger,” said Cook. “When [Nehemiah and I] were in there, there were 40 of us.”
“Yeah, my class had 40 people in it. It was 14 guys and 26 girls,” said Guinn. “So, the guy to girl ratio wasn’t far off at least.”
With such a huge difference in population, it was clearly a little difficult for them to adjust to campus life. However, it wasn’t the number of people that made the transition from Impact to Union a daunting task. The biggest difference was the community itself.
“The biggest transitioning thing for me is at Impact we’re being constantly poured into by mentors and everything in the day is scheduled out,” said Guinn.
Cook had similar thoughts and further explained that being such a small group meant that you didn’t really have a choice of who you became friends with. You had 39 other people there and you pretty much had to make friends with them.
At Union, the community isn’t the same. That’s not to say that it’s any better or worse but it’s just a jarring difference. For nine months at Impact, you follow these teachers to the foot of a mountain and let them plan your day out so that they can continually guide you into adulthood. Union is a school. A school where professors care about us and our spiritual well-being, but a school nevertheless. They don’t really live with us. Going from such a close-knit place to an institution where you have to intentionally look for people to help you grow as a person can be really difficult.
Fortunately, they were prepared for this. Impact taught them how to engage in their community and build stronger connections with the people around them. Pine Mountain just happened to be the perfect microcosm for that.
“Pine Mountain was a great place to have that community because it was a very small town, but we were able to be a part of the community,” said Tripp Warren, an Impact 360 alumnus. “By the end, it really felt like home.”