By May 2006, Carrie Underwood had already sold millions of copies of her debut album, yet she still returned to an Oklahoma campus to collect her journalism degree.

She had learned early how quickly Nashville could close a door. When she was 14, a local admirer arranged for her to travel to Nashville and audition for Capitol Records, which began preparing a recording contract before a sudden corporate management change canceled the deal.

When she graduated from Checotah High School in 2001 as salutatorian, Underwood concluded that chasing Nashville was too uncertain and enrolled about forty-five miles northeast at Northeastern State University. She chose a Bachelor of Arts in mass communications with an emphasis in broadcast journalism, aiming for a steady job in television news.

At home, her father, Stephen, had worked thirty years in a paper mill while her mother, Carole, taught elementary school, and Underwood took on a string of part-time jobs around Tahlequah to pay her own way. Between journalism lectures, she waited tables at a pizzeria, worked the front desk at a motel, and cleaned cages while tending to sick animals overnight at a veterinary clinic.

During college, she joined the Alpha Iota chapter of the Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority, played intramural flag football, and spent two summer months in Oklahoma City working as a legislative page for State Representative Bobby Frame. In the spring of 2004, she competed in the campus pageant and finished as runner-up for Miss NSU.

Even while preparing for a newsroom career, she kept singing on weekends in Tahlequah. For two summers, she took the stage at the university’s Downtown Country revue alongside fellow student Zach Swon, earning extra money for textbooks and tuition inside the historic Muskogee-area theater district.

That routine shifted on August 8, 2004, just before her senior year, when she traveled to the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, Missouri, to audition for the fourth season of American Idol. Singing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” for the judges, the 21-year-old earned a golden ticket that put her on an airplane for the first time in her life to fly to Hollywood.

Throughout the televised rounds in early 2005, she kept her composure by reminding herself that an elimination simply meant packing her bags, returning to her apartment in Tahlequah, and finishing her last semester before applying at a local broadcast station.

Instead, after performing songs like Heart’s “Alone” and Randy Travis’s “Bless the Broken Road,” she won the season finale on May 25, 2005. Signed to Arista Nashville and 19 Recordings, she headed straight into the studio with producers Mark Bright and Dann Huff.

Her debut album, Some Hearts, arrived on November 15, 2005, led by the six-week country number one “Jesus, Take the Wheel” and followed by “Don’t Forget to Remember Me” and “Before He Cheats”. She also co-wrote the album’s thirteenth track, “I Ain’t in Checotah Anymore,” looking back at the small Oklahoma town she had just left behind.

Because her months working in front of network cameras on live national television fulfilled her remaining three-credit broadcast internship requirement, Northeastern State University cleared her to graduate with her class.

On May 6, 2006, right as her debut headlining tour was getting underway, Underwood slipped on a green cap and gown in Tahlequah and received her diploma Magna Cum Laude while her parents and sorority sisters watched from the bleachers.