Hadley Non Fiction

note: this essay is way over the word limit so I would appreciate comments on what I can take out :) In our society, people make assumptions about others based on their appearance every day. Because I’m a girl, many people assume that I am not smart enough to be successful in engineering. I have wanted to be an engineer since grade school, and if I hadn’t been raised in such a nurturing environment, I’m not sure that I would still be confident enough to do it. I can’t pick only one time that people have expressed doubts about my ability to pursue engineering, so I am going to talk about a few of the times that I still think about to this day. The first time I remember experiencing someone thinking I wasn’t good enough because of my gender was when I was still in grade school and I joined an all-girls First Lego League team. We worked hard during the months leading up to the competition and ended up winning the Judge’s Choice award and qualifying for state. Even though we were clear...

Under my bed is a huge tub stuffed full of horse show ribbons. If you dig deep enough, there are ribbons from when I rode at barns that I left years ago. On the top are the ribbons that I have won on my current horse Kip, and all of the ribbons in between tell the story of my riding career. I have switched barns more than most riders do in their lives, and I have ridden at almost every barn in the Champaign area at some point. I was seven years old when I first started riding at my first barn and I was a natural. My confidence grew as I breezed through my weekly lessons and easily brought home blue ribbons at the local horse shows. My trainer at the time did not challenge me and always told me that I was great and didn’t need to change. I realized that this was not what I needed to progress as a rider, so I sought out a lesson at a new barn with the coach of the Illinois Equestrian Team. Instantly, my talent paradigm blew up. The jumps were high and the courses were complex. The ...