There’s an old saying: “You can’t go home again.” But when home is Mississippi State University, you can. In my case, it’s happened not once but twice.
When I transferred from Duke to join Jeff—my high school sweetheart and now husband—at State in 1996, I had no idea how much I would grow to love this special community. The quiet beauty of the Drill Field, sound of the Famous Maroon Band and way everyone on campus seemed so down to earth and friendly made MSU feel like home.
When I graduated in December 1998 with a degree in communication, I was hopeful life would bring me back for visits. Then in 2003, Jeff was offered a position in MSU’s Professional Golf Management program. While we loved the life we were building in Nashville, Tennessee, the opportunity was very enticing, and we made the move. I took a job as the catalog editor and class schedule coordinator in MSU’s Office of the Registrar. Thankfully, I enjoy jigsaw puzzles and games like Tetris because building a class schedule for a growing university is a puzzle by every definition of the word.
When I was a student, we waited anxiously for class schedules printed on newsprint to appear in Allen Hall’s lobby. When registration day came, my friends and I may or may not have skipped class to register for the next semester by phone—usually getting a busy signal multiple times before finally getting through to the registration system.
Thankfully by 2003, students could register online and didn’t rely on the printed schedule. In my first years back, we continued to make online tools more user-friendly and became less reliant on printed resources. But whether it is printed or online, compiling the class schedule each semester is difficult—never more so than in fall 2020.
COVID-19 sent the university into remote operations in March of that year, but all were hopeful we could return to in-person class by August. That meant creating socially distanced classrooms, identifying nontraditional spaces to use as classrooms and reworking the puzzle of classroom assignments.
While most university staff worked from home that summer, our scheduling team—including Emily Owen and Lynn Palmer Purnell—was visiting each classroom with tape measures and painter’s tape, determining new capacities of each space. We set up a “war room” to see what spaces were available—from traditional classrooms to Humphrey Coliseum—how many students they could safely hold and in what combination they could be best used so we could still provide all the classes our students needed.
That project in 2020 will always be one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks I have managed. During that chaos, our family decided to move to Kentucky so Jeff could pursue a career opportunity. I was fortunate to stay in Starkville to help our staff overcome the COVID-19 obstacles and then to continue to work part time remotely. Then in 2024, Registrar Emily Shaw asked me to come home again and rejoin the team full time. Since our oldest daughter was graduating high school and Jeff was working remotely, it was a great time to return to MSU.
Everyone says MSU is like a family, and it really is. I can’t imagine anywhere else where you could be away for four years yet feel like you never left. Starkville keeps drawing us back because no matter where a Bulldog goes, it is always home sweet home.
Jackson, Tennessee, native Amy Adkerson holds a 1998 bachelor’s in communication and a 2009 master’s in instructional technology, both from Mississippi State. Since 2024, she has served the university as associate registrar. Her husband Jeff also holds two MSU degrees, having earned a marketing bachelor’s in 1999 and an MBA in 2005. He is also a former director of MSU’s PGA Golf Management and Golf Operations program. The couple has two daughters: Emily, a sophomore in kinesiology, and high schooler Lauren.