When you pass Søren Dahl in the hallways of Moudy South you can’t help but notice him. He stands at well over six feet tall, with a brilliant shock of bleach blond hair, ready to flash a bright smile at everyone he meets.

When he lifts his arm to wave at you, you’re likely to catch a flash of the tattoo on his forearm. The neat rendering of the Olympic rings is the first hint you’ll catch that this grad student is a lot more than he seems. In 2016, this future Horned Frog was swimming for his home country of Denmark in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.

So how did Søren end up in Fort Worth as one of the Schieffer College of Communication’s most beloved teaching assistants?

That is an interesting story.

According to the World Happiness Report, Denmark is the second happiest country in the world. And yet, Søren wasn’t quite happy. As he neared the end of his high school career, he was faced with a difficult choice: he could continue his schooling by attending the nearby university, or he could pursue swimming professionally. But Søren wanted both.

His solution? Go to America.

More specifically, he went to North Carolina State University, where he would be able to earn his degree and continue swimming, with the added bonus of getting to experience the American college lifestyle he had seen so often on TV. But at the end of four years, Søren still wasn’t ready to go home. He had learned to love the life he had made in America. Plus, he wasn’t sure exactly how he would put his American political science degree to work in Denmark. So he started looking for graduate schools.

That’s when he found TCU. Even though it meant that, once again, Søren would be moving to an unfamiliar place with no connections, TCU felt right. He would have the opportunity to get his master’s degree in strategic communication, a subject he was not only passionate about, but an area of expertise he could make use of when he went back to Denmark.

And so Søren Dahl is in Fort Worth, cheerfully helping grateful undergraduate students in the Research and Channel Planning classes while simultaneously working towards his own degree. It took a long journey to get him here, but the Schieffer College is better off for it.