Niko Kowell ’08 currently works at TRANS: THRIVE in San Francisco, California. I met with him after interviewing Michael Bare ’02 just around the corner from Niko’s office (which had the vibe of a place where somebody works a lot). On a chair was a pile of boxes full of pasta packages. “You like pasta?” I asked him. He told me that it wasn’t necessarily that he had a particular fondness for pasta, but that the kitchen was full and he was keeping food in his office for clients of TRANS: THRIVE. We talked about Antioch, old and new, and about some of his more formative co-op experiences.
I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t gone to Antioch. Antioch allowed me to grow in a way that I’m not sure I would have been able to do in Cincinatti. It allowed me to experience other things and not be afraid to go other places. Now I feel like I can pack my stuff up and move to wherever, and I’m not worried about it, because I know what it takes to get an apartment and get a job and make new friends and try to get into a new community, and it’s not scary. And when I was 19, that terrified me. So I think Antioch really allowed me to grow as a person, into the type of person that I wanted to be, that didn’t have this fear around who I was and where I could go and what I could do.
