College Recruitment T-Shirt Design

Our university hands out t-shirts during fall recruitment when we host receptions across the country. They've been fairly bland over the past few years, and I wanted to take lead in making it fresh. We'd like the shirt to be crimson, grey, white, or black with a back-and-front design. Our university has a very unique name: Transylvania University. We want students to WANT the shirt. But, we have some limitations. We struggle with brand awareness. Despite the name, we are actually the 16th oldest college and one of the top liberal arts colleges in America. We were founded 100 years before Dracula was written, but deal with that reaction constantly out-of-state. We are actually located in Lexington, Ky. in a vibrant city and are very academically challenging. (27 ACT, 3.7 GPA average). We were established by Thomas Jefferson and have some of the most important alumni and faculty in American history (John C. Breckinridge, Henry Clay, Stephen F. Austin, Jefferson Davis, etc.) For these shirts, we do NOT want a vampire theme. We want people to begin to associate ourselves with our academic quality and tradition in American history, and most importantly with our REAL mascot: the Pioneer. After all, Transylvania actually means "across the woods." Our theme this year is "Be a Pioneer." And it has a two-fold meaning. Not only do we want you as a student at Transylvania, we want you to be a student who pushes the boundaries in your field, discovers new ideas, and challenge/questions everything. We want "Be a Pioneer" to be a visible wording, (preferably in the last part of the copy) on the shirt. (Other options of wording to use in conjunction: trailblazer, revolutionary, don't just be a leader..., etc.) We'd also thought it would be cool to have an interactive QR code on the back of the tee within an image so friends and others who view the shirt could be able to interact with it. But, this isn't a necessity. We want to appeal to our 16-18 year old college-bound audience, so we're leaving it up to the designer to provide several options for us. We'd like a unique, cool, college shirt that others will want to have. * Note: We are accepting bids but will not guarantee that we will chose one of the proposals.