An Industry that Keeps Bringing You Back

It's ironic how things work. Thursday night was one of those horrible nights that you wish was a bad dream. My friend's mare finally foaled (after being on heavy duty foal watch for a few days prior) but after a weird delivery, the foal was born dead. At some point, her umbilical cord had gotten (for lack of a better word) kinked, cutting oxygen off to the foal. While it was a horrible experience, instead of chasing me away from the industry again, it actually brought me back.

If you know me, you know that when I was a teenager, my life was all about horses. There was a time that I was on the road nearly every weekend with my horse and had major dreams of being a big rider. As that dream slowly faded due to lack of money and life getting in the way, I moved on to other things. And when I got injured, I pretty much stepped out of the horse industry all together other than watching horse racing.

While I have been writing articles about horse racing off and on over the past year or so, it was mostly just a fun thing. I love the whole industry and have a lot of opinions on it so writing about racing let me get some of those opinions out. But I honestly never thought about rejoining the industry in an active role until the past few months. When I first got my USEF internship, I figured I'd go, get the experience, then move on to another sport. But now, that plan has drastically changed and I hope that I can stay in some position like the one I'll be doing for the six months after graduation.

Horses are amazing animals, I don't think many people will dispute that. But what we all seem to fail to realize is that they have some sort of weird power over us that lets us think we can escape before pulling us back in. I may have spent the past few years trying to escape my horse craziness that was my life when I was younger but I think it's time to face the facts that it will never go away. So I think it's time to give in and admit that for once, my younger version was way smarter than the person I am today on this issue.

Liz Murray

WT added another thing to it's resume when it comes to changing my life last night. Every year, we have something called "Communications Week". Last year I didn't participate but last night I went to the guest speaker they brought in. Her name is Liz Murray and she's probably mostly known as the "Homeless to Harvard" girl. To kind of explain her story, I've linked a video below so you can get a better feel about her than I could ever describe.

I'm not going to lie, at first I wasn't planning on going to this speech. I was supposed to work the reception beforehand for the Eternal Flame and decided that after the reception, I'd go do homework. But after going to the reception, I decided to join my friends to watch the speech. It was definitely a night full of learning for me. 

When I showed up to the reception, I learned it wasn't really for students, more for the big, important people that help run the school. I talked to people from the Board of Advisers for our college and other people I'd never dream of being in a room with at any other time. It was definitely a learning experience on smoozing. 

As we went into the lecture after the reception, I was hoping it would be a 45 minute thing followed by 15 minutes of questions, then we'd be done and even kept checking the time for the first 10 minutes or so but Liz finally sucked me in and I never wanted it to end. She was the right sort of entertaining and inspiring that after the lecture, I wanted to go out and do something productive. Here was a lady that was homeless and STILL made something of her life, after a speech like that, you can't feel sorry for yourself. And it's really made me step up and reevaluate where I am right now. How can I continue to better myself? That's the burning question that I have in my brain.

It's been 24 hours and I'm still attempting to digest everything I heard last night and how it affects me. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to sit down and be totally honest with myself and figure out how I can't only help myself, but also help others like Liz Murray did. I'm definitely going to get her book soon so I can be reminded about the speech and think about the "What If" she brought up when talking about life changing moments. Like she said, a life changing experience can be inches away from you at all times, I'm ready to find that experience and take it head on.

For the love of sports

Tonight The Prairie had a mixer with the local community college where we not only got to mingle with each other and give the visiting students a chance to experience WT but the editor of the local major paper in the area, the Amarillo Globe, also came to talk to us.

One of the things he said was that as journalists, our goal should be to make a change in the community where we work. He gave some real life examples that make total sense and while I’m not really planning on doing anything outside of sports, I related to what he said and even saw how it could apply to my area of the industry.

I’m not sure if I’m going to be a journalist in the “real” sense or if I’m going to go into media relations but like making a difference in the community, I want to make a different for whatever sport I work in. My immediate plans are obviously to work with the USEF and my goal there isn’t just to grow the association within the equestrian community, but also to educate those outside of the industry about this part of the Olympic team.

Sports as a whole are huge in cultures all over the world but at least in America, not many people focus on our national teams. And with hundreds of professional teams playing year-round on television, I understand how our country’s teams can get lost in the shuffle. But I also believe that with the right kind of attention given to these teams, they can gain more popularity and fans. The ways to reach this goal may change throughout my career but working for one of the US National Teams has been one of my goals for quite a while now and I think that this is one goal that I will always focus on.

I know my goal is a huge undertaking but if I can get more people to focus on national teams during my career, I will feel like I have accomplished something. So yes, the speech we got may have applied to local communities and non-sports news but like a ton of stuff I have learned during my school career, information that doesn’t directly apply to my field can always give me ideas for my own field.

Moving On

My editor pointed out yesterday that we just have 11 more issues of the paper until we graduate and today in another meeting, we were reminded that Green Lighting starts this month to register for the Fall semester. It's slowly hitting me that even though the school is already preparing for the Fall semester, I don't have anything to plan for when it comes to school, at least for the next year.

The surprising thing is that while this would have bugged me a month ago, now I'm totally okay with graduating. Now that I have a plan in place for at least the first few months after I graduate, I'm okay with moving on. I've been at WT for two years now and while the first year wasn't that great (okay, there were points that I hated it) this year has been everything and more than I could have imagined, but I can't see myself here next year.

Sure, staying a kid for another year would be amazing, but I'm ready to accomplish my goals and take the world head on. Really, even though I planned to stay here for another semester and had good reasons to in my head, it wasn't the real reason I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay because I was afraid to grow up and looking at how I would have been then, I really wouldn't have been all that happy with my choice.

One of the assignments for my portfolio class was to find a job listing to be "interviewed" for and while other people have struggled with finding any job that interests them, I found mine within one minute. And it's actually a job I would love to have. This may not be a big deal to most people, but finding the job and realizing that it's something that I would love to do prepared me for moving on.

With this newfound confidence, the next 96 days will be full of enjoying the last of my college experience instead of worrying about the future.