Andrew Farmer, a communication senior and a student assistant in the Division of Communications and Marketing, will walk the graduation stage on Saturday, May 3. Photo by Angela Foster.
When University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student Andrew Farmer graduated from East Hamilton High School in 2021, he was torn between going to East Tennessee State University or UTC.
After struggling for months to choose between the two, Farmer finally decided to leave it up to fate.
“I pushed it to the last second,” Farmer said. “It was mid-July, and I still hadn’t decided. So I was like, ‘I’m just going to flip a coin because I don’t know what to do; they’re both good.”’
Farmer found a quarter, assigned one side to ETSU and the other to UTC, then flipped the coin 10 times. By the end of the coin toss, UTC had won and he knew which school he would attend.
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Although Farmer was prepared to study biology at UTC to go into the medical field, he soon realized that science was not for him and stayed undecided for his freshman year. During this time, he took a decision-making class that helped him decide to major in communication.
“We had to do this project where we compared two majors, and I chose photography as one because I’m a photographer. I’ve been doing that for a while and then I just pulled communication out of nothing,” Farmer said. “Then I actually learned a lot about communication … by the end of that project, I was like, ‘Actually, that sounds like something I would be interested in.’”
Farmer admitted that before college, he did not know what someone with a communication degree would do and doubted its value—but after exploring it further, he learned that there was a lot he could do with it.
“I remember specifically saying, ‘I would never do communication. What are you going to do with that?’ And now, here I am,” Farmer said. “Faith is a big part of my life and God has a funny way of having a laugh.”
Farmer happily stuck with the major and—by the end of his sophomore year—he began looking for a job in the field.
“I wanted something that was going to be more relevant to my career later, so I was like, ‘Let’s see if they have any student jobs in the marketing department at UTC,”’ Farmer recalled.
He was able to meet with department personnel, which led to a student assistant position.
“It’s amazing what you can get when you just happen to ask the right person,” he said.
In his role, Farmer has worked on UTC’s website by selecting photos for the front page, writing copy blocks, collecting data and conducting research. He has led social media takeovers, worked on advertisements and helped with countless projects over the course of his two years in the department.
“I do whatever they need me to do,” Farmer said. “It’s a lot of copywriting and pulling data from Google analytics … whatever they need help with.”
Now, as he prepares to graduate, Farmer is especially grateful for his position, as it has led him to decide to study data analytics in graduate school.
“The longer I’ve been working this job, the more I have discovered that I really enjoy looking at the data and the analytics behind social media campaigns, marketing campaigns and website traffic,” Farmer said. “I think it’s been a perfect blending of the creative aspect that I really enjoy … and relating that back to the numbers, figuring out this is what worked, this is what didn’t work.”
Taking the skills he’s learned off campus, Farmer has had the opportunity to travel to the Bahamas and Italy in the last couple of years, giving him a chance to use his knowledge in a different cultural context.
“I feel like going to college is a very rewarding thing when you expand your view,” Farmer said. “Then you go experience other cultures, whether that be Italy or the Bahamas or somewhere else … and I got to compare my experience as a UTC student to some of the people that I met abroad. I’ve even gotten to share a lot of the skills that I’ve learned at UTC.”
Within the campus community, Farmer has also been able to reshape his perspective on school and Chattanooga by getting to know people who came to UTC from other parts of the country.
“There’s this one girl that I met my freshman year from Maryland, and I remember asking her, ‘What on earth are you doing here? How did you end up here?’ And she was like, ‘I love Chattanooga. It’s the best city that I’ve ever lived in,” Farmer said.
After every exciting experience and important decision that’s come his way over the last four years, Farmer is ready for whichever side the coin lands on next—carrying him through life’s latest adventure.
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