P10
April 2012
Matt
Muchna
came to GCU for the swimming team. He stayed for the
Tater Tots.
“I thought, ‘I could eat them every morning if I went here,’” he says of his first visit to the
Student Union cafeteria while still a high school student from Prescott.
It wasn’t long before he was sampling much more than the crispy little potatoes.
Muchna’s involvement in campus athletics, activities and causes appears to have set a
new standard, and he has done it in only three years. He’ll graduate in May, and his flip-
flops will be hard to fill.
Check it out: Business and sociology major. Men’s swimming and cross country teams.
Hegel Hall resident adviser. Drummer in the pep band. Mentor for underprivileged
grade-school kids. Contestant in “Mr. GCU.” Even multicultural director of ASGCU, the
student-government organization.
He explored all of what college had to offer, managing to keep a grin on his face, and
isn’t that the way it’s supposed to go?
“I’ve always been a little bit ADD,” says Muchna, 20, who arrived at GCU with nearly a
year’s worth of college credits from Yavapai College, which he attended while still in
high school.
“Once I learn something, I want a new challenge… I came in with this idea that (college)
would be what I made of it, and that probably drove me to pursue opportunities
here. It’s been more than I expected. I’ve learned a lot about leadership, organization,
friendship and life. It’s pretty cool.”
His summer experiences were even more eclectic. After his first year at GCU, he lived in
Eugene, Ore., worked construction, hiked a mountain in Canada and visited a friend in
Europe. After his second year, he worked a job on the beach in Hawai‘i, where he went
surfing and spear fishing, and also hitchhiked his way up the Pacific Coast to Seattle,
where he played harmonica on the streets with a friend he had met along the way.
“I met some of the nicest people,” he says of hitching, “but my mom doesn’t like me
doing it.”
He comes by the wanderlust naturally. The son of a veterinarian father and nutritionist
mother, he was born on a farm in Iowa and lived in Mississippi before the family moved
to Arizona. (That’s multicultural, for sure.)
“My dad’s kind of like me,” Muchna says, “and he gets bored easily. He once sold
hydroponic vegetables out of our basement. He has done acupuncture on animals and
now he’s teaching at Yavapai.”
However, even a Tater Tot-loving free spirit can run out of fuel. Toward the end of
Muchna’s second year, he considered dropping out of GCU, thinking that he needed
a break.
“You could finish in a year,” an academic adviser told him, persuading him to stick it out.
He’s glad he did – “I realized that if I left, I’d want to come back and finish,” he says –and
he’s up for whatever’s next, mentioning Central America as a possible postgraduate
destination.
“I don’t have any debt and I’m not in a serious relationship – that’s a shout-out to the
ladies,” Muchna says, laughing. “I’ll never be in this position again. For the future Matt,
I need to go explore.
“I’m still trying to figure me out.”
In just three years,
free spirit has done
it all at GCU
