Levi Flood, senior, is a student with more life experience than many of the professors on campus have had. At 18 years old, he joined the Navy straight out of high school with the hopes to become a Chaplin. But with high entrance exam scores, he was pushed to go into the nuclear field and became a nuclear chemist much to his chagrin. He stayed in the Navy for the next eight years, as he married his high school sweetheart and had two sons with her.
However, once his enlistment was over, instead of joining the workforce, he chose to go and get a Bachelor’s degree. He went for a degree in Communication with a focus in Sports Journalism. His driving motivation was his family that he rarely got to see while with the Navy.
“I hated my job (in the Navy) with a burning passion. I worked very long hours and didn’t see my wife or children often at all and I wanted to find a job where I can look forward to going to work every day and where I could not have to work so much that I would never see my family,” Flood said.
While his work in the Navy gave him valuable life skills, it also left a bitter taste in his mouth and a distrust for the government.
“Before I joined I was very pro war, big Bush supporter (still am) and afterwards I got really bitter. I’m almost a conspiracy theorist now and the more I saw the inside of it the more I disliked it and distrusted it,” he said. He also admitted that politics are no longer his strong suit either.
“I can’t speak intelligently to it. Kind of to my shame, I’ve gotten very bitter to politics and stopped paying attention.”
His family and education are not the only things Flood enjoys doing. As an avid fisherman, he enjoys going out almost daily at 4 A.M before school starts. But he doesn’t always just catch fish.
“My best fishing story was in South Carolina in Charleston. We’d been out fishing for catfish, bass, and whatever else all day. We had two boats and there were 12 of us. We got out at 6 am and it was around midnight when I hooked something big. The drag just started screaming out and the fish was taking off quick. I fought it for about 20 mins and my arms started to give out. So I passed the rod off. The next guy fought it for about the same amount of time. There was four of us and we fought it for about an hour and a half. It felt like it was gonna break the line so we’d let it run and reel it in. Around 1:30 am we call the second boat in with nets, put two spotlights on it. It turned out to be a Good Year tire filled with cement and the current rolled it so it dragged our boat for about a quarter of a mile,” he said, recalling his best fishing story.
He is set to graduate this spring semester and looks forward to having a degree. But his education and aspirations don’t stop there. He hopes one day to become a pastor and lead a church. He hopes to eventually get a very big dog too.