Fiona Giselle Hackett / The Mossy Log
As a high school student, Owen Dornan ’29 was already going into schools to talk about composting.
“I had an environmental education business that I was very passionate about, and I would go into schools, and I would talk about composting,” Dornan said.
His passion, he said, “felt like it was so far outside of school.” He talked with his parents about dropping out to focus on it, but his mother would not allow him to leave school and become a business owner. That left him set “down a track of forever trying to chase that next opportunity in schools.”
Dornan, now a double major in economics and environmental studies, belongs to all three groups this column follows: nontraditional, transfer and international students, who bring an intricate and complex set of life experiences to campus. He knows he has “so much experience and that experience is valuable.”
His area of interest centers on tourism and its impact on communities. He transferred to LC in Fall 2026 as an “in-betweener,” a student on the sophomore-junior cusp, a common place for students navigating different credit systems across several institutions.
Before LC, Dornan spent time at three very different institutions, taking a couple of gap years in between each. Dornan went to an upper-secondary education program at United World College on Vancouver Island two years into high school to study the International Baccalaureate, representing his home country of Canada.
“It’s one of 18 schools around the world … most people are on a scholarship and everybody represents a different country,” Dornan said.
After the completion of that program and a gap year, Dornan went to The Flight School, a non-traditional organization based out of San Francisco that prioritizes real-world experiences to “Fellows,” where he was supported in exploring a research question of his choosing. Dornan said his research focused on “tourism and how it affects different communities,” because his home community is “very impacted by tourism.” To explore this, he spent time with different organizations in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Following The Flight School and prior to transferring to LC, Dornan was at Lake Forest College outside of Chicago. Asked about his most recent transfer, Dornan said it was a leap of faith.
“I think with every coming day, I’m becoming more and more comfortable with it, but it was definitely a huge leap of faith that I wasn’t sure about when I was originally thinking about what was the best fit for me,” Dornan said.
What Dornan values most is that each stop along the way that brought him to LC was in spaces that offered nontraditional approaches to education alongside other fellow international students. While all journeys are unique, some common threads show up for nontraditional, transfer and/or international students. Dornan shared the pressure he felt in making the “right” choice and the difficulty of navigating culture shock as an international student and moving from one type of higher education setting to another.
Asked whether he felt hopeful in the third week of the fall semester, Dornan said it was too early to be sure.
“I do think that Lewis & Clark is slowly but surely showing me that there is a space for post-secondary education for people who think it’s not for them,” he said.
One barrier for Dornan was thinking that only jobs held the experience he sought, and did not know if university would provide that same knowledge. Because of scholarships, doors opened and he now believes that, “even if you feel like there’s nothing to learn there’s always something to learn.” This ties into the impostor syndrome that many nontraditional, transfer and international students face.
“It’s important to reflect on what you’ve gained from each of those experiences and try to bring those experiences and that wisdom into Lewis & Clark and into this community,” he said.
Throughout additional issues of The Mossy Log published in the 2026-27 school year, our readers will get to hear from conversations with students who fall into the categories of transfer, nontraditional and/or international, and written by a first-generation nontraditional transfer student arriving at LC this year as a junior from a community college in rural Oregon. These features are intended to reveal how valuable the unique experiences of nontraditional students are.
If you are interested in having a conversation with the writer, please contact lc26-0762@lclark.edu.
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