Becoming an Explorer was an easy choice

La Salle University’s Communication 4+1 program made pursuing a master’s degree easy for Alana Lathan, ‘25, M.A. ‘26, and is preparing her to start her career with confidence.

When Alana Lathan, ‘25, M.A. ‘26, enrolled in La Salle University’s Communication 4+1 program, she was thinking about the opportunity it opened up for her to play lacrosse for one more year. Now, as she enters her last semester of graduate school, the program has become so much more.

Lathan started her higher education journey at George Mason University as a student-athlete on the women’s lacrosse team. After completing her freshman year, Lathan, who grew up in Phoenixville, PA, went into the transfer portal and circled back to La Salle, a school she looked at initially but decided against as she wanted to move further from home.

As a first-generation student, higher education was an unfamiliar territory, but her move to 20^th and Olney helped her get through that.

“In terms of taking the step to college, just as a first-generation student in general, you’re kind of like, ‘okay, what am I doing?’ And then when you’re playing a sport too, it’s like, ‘let’s just make it extra hard,’” she said. “But it was really easy navigating it through different resources here at La Salle.”

As an undergraduate, Lathan was a communication major with a public relations concentration. She signed up for the 4+1 program after being redshirted as a freshman on the women’s lacrosse team, meaning she had another year of eligibility to play. Although she was on the team for three years, and loved every minute, playing at the collegiate level started to take a physical toll. Lathan decided to end her athletic career at the end of her fourth season.

While a fifth season was out of the picture, there was still the fifth year of her academic program to consider.

“I was like, you know what, I think I’m going to go through with this. After getting your bachelor’s, it’s like you’re on a high, and as a first-gen, I thought I might as well get as far as I can,” she said. “I learned a lot about myself academically throughout college and was like, this is something I could really do. So, when I had the opportunity to get my master’s, it was something I was definitely going to try to do.”

The process that a person goes through to get to and complete graduate school is something that Lathan believes stops a lot of people from doing it, she said, adding that that wasn’t the case for her.

“I definitely think that La Salle made it a point to make it easy for students to keep learning and keep getting higher education,” she said. “Honestly, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.”

As she transitioned from the undergraduate level to the graduate level, what she’s learning has changed.

The first four years of the program had a lot of focus on the theoretical side of communications; the graduate year has provided her the opportunity to learn in a more tactile and hands-on way.

“Instead of learning about a press release I’m writing a press release,” she said. “In the master’s program we’ve been very focused on making sure we can actually do the work that we learned about in the past.”

The people she’s learning alongside in her final year also make a difference. In a smaller department, like the communication department, a lot of the undergraduate classes are filled with the same people. The mix of people who joined at the master’s level is one of Lathan’s favorite things about the program.

“It gave me a learning environment where I got to learn different perspectives of different people, and just learn as much as I could,” she said. Some of the people in her class include students from different schools, different programs, and students who have already entered the professional world. “They have an abundance of knowledge in whatever they were pursuing, and they can then share it with us in class through answers or projects they present.”

The hands-on style of learning, her classmates, and the relationships that she’s built with faculty and alumni have all left Lathan feeling prepared for her future career. There’s a level of support and encouragement that she’s experienced from the faculty that has built her confidence in taking every opportunity that is offered and making the most of it.

“I know everyone says that in terms of college, no one really holds your hand,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it’s a hand-holding situation where there’s a helicopter mom over you, but La Salle is definitely a place where you’re being encouraged and given guidance.”

Lathan’s current goal is to go into the professional sports’ public relations field, an area which she has some experience in having acted as La Salle’s graduate assistant for recreational sports where her duties include general marketing work and social media management. Faculty and staff in the Explorer community have helped her figure out how to make that career goal happen.

The exciting thing about her master’s degree is that it hasn’t boxed her in to only one type of role, she said, in fact it’s opened her eyes to all the different ways she can use it.

“I’m really excited to apply PR to a lot of different departments,” she said, naming community relations as one example. “La Salle has made that really easy with all the content they’ve been teaching us.”

Throughout her time as an Explorer, the main thing she’s taken with her is the importance of relationships with all members of the community, both making and maintaining them.

“I think being part of the program here at La Salle, and honestly just a La Salle student, has made me really appreciate the relationships that I’ve built,” she said. “The smaller population of students and being a student-athlete, you really learn a lot about yourself and other people.”

–Naomi Thomas

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