When Connor Heagy `26 first learned about Grinnell through his art teacher, he did not expect to actually come here.
Coming from Carmel, Indiana, he expected to attend college outside the Midwest.
“That was kind of my mantra for senior year. I wanted to explore a little bit,” he said. “I was thinking, East Coast or West Coast, those romanticized places.”
However, after meeting the College community and his potential cross country teammates, Heagy felt this was the place to be.
“After I’d met them, I got a sense of what the people are like here, and just how down-to-earth they are,” he said about his teammates.
“I thought people here I could resonate with, and I found that through my teammates and coming here.”
Running in college felt like the next step for Heagy, who had run cross country since middle school. He said Sarah Burnell, head cross country coach, gave him an opportunity.
“I wasn’t a crazy, good runner, but she took a risk on me and allowed me to come on the team. I don’t regret that decision either. I’ve never wanted to quit even on the hardest days, so it’s been a great experience.”
Heagy said the Grinnell cross country team has been pivotal in his time here. “I think the team for me, throughout my past four years here, has been the glue for everything that I do running-wise and academic-wise,” he said.
As a computer science (CS) and studio art major, Heagy has interwoven his two majors to create a unique medium.
“CS was something that was interesting to me because you are still creating as a programmer. You’re coding some application that will help someone else or do something. So in my kind of realm of things, I felt like coding can be used as an artistic outlet as well,” Heagy said.
“I felt like coming into college, art was always something I wanted to have in my life, and then I was like how can intersect some other discipline to create a synergetic new thing.”
He hopes to use these two disciplines together to work in user interface and user experience design. “So as a UX/UI designer, my job would be to create those front-end interfaces. They’re an empathetic design, putting myself in other people’s shoes, the users, then being able to meet their needs,” he said.
Heagy has worked on projects, such as Netify, a music notation app, and Velox, a training app designed for runners.
He said these projects allowed his artistic abilities to mix with programming to create something, whether for himself or someone else.
“Every time I make a new project in CS class or if it’s a hobby, when I see it working as intended, it’s the craziest thing to me because I spend so much time on it and most of the time it doesn’t work out, so the time it does, it’s pretty cool,” he said.
To Heagy, conversations he’s had at Grinnell have become a thing he loves most. He said a casual conversation about violin making once led to a lifting session the following week.
“You know, a couple years ago, I met this guy I never talked to. He was a senior, and I was like a sophomore, and we both sparked up a conversation about violin making. I learned about the whole process of violin making. Then, after that, I connected with him, and we started lifting together the next week. It was like things like that that I’ve never experienced before,” he said.
These experiences not only fostered connections but also helped Heagy better shape himself for the career he wants to pursue one day.
“You have to be an empathetic person. You have to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes, and I think I’ve really been able to accomplish that. As someone who’s really passionate about what they want to do, I take that seriously as well,” he said.
“I think those are important just in general in life to be accommodating, to be welcoming, and to be a kind person. So I do think that Grinnell has helped me in those senses.”
