| From Texas to AU, by way of Spain
Photo by Jeff Watts |
About a year ago, Ashley Baumgarner was walking into a smoky hostel in Barcelona, Spain, with a very large bag and a sudden desire to cry. She had already abandoned a career as a model to earn a bachelor’s in English at the University of Texas. Now her love of language had led her to travel alone to Spain, intent on enhancing her conversational knowledge of Spanish. She took a deep breath and remembered the saying of scholar Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss.” If you follow a path that makes you happy, it will work out. It did. For four enjoyable months, she studied Spanish and painting. Then she took another plunge into the unknown, arriving in Washington, D.C., at a friend’s invitation and hunting for a job where she could do two things she enjoyed: use her writing skills and interact with people. Two weeks later, she was working at AU’s Office of the President as senior administrative assistant and making plans to study literature in graduate school. Baumgarner has long been a writer, even when she was balancing high school and the life of a teen model—a career spurred by a chance conversation at a clothing store. At age 14 the conversation led her to a casting call, accompanied by her skeptical mother. What followed was a five-year career on the runway that opened the eyes of the young Texan to much about the world, from its diversity to the pressures it can put on young women. “When I was 14 or 15, I was a rail. Before you hit puberty, it can be like that. But the pressure put on as you get older makes you think about parts of yourself you never, ever considered,” she says. “But it was such a good learning experience. I’d never regret it. You can get a little self-conscious, but you also get a little stronger.” At 19, she vetoed a suggestion to get a nose job, and decided the time had come to move on. After her studies in English literature, she spent a year helping her parents in their furniture business, which included everything from cabinet design to interacting in Spanish with Mexican suppliers. Always drawn to language, she wanted to become as fluent as possible in Spanish. The summer in Barcelona was her chance, she said, “to do something I wanted to do and quit focusing on what I ‘should’ do. I wanted the challenge.” Her next challenge, she hopes, will be graduate school. In her free time, she likes to paint, write, and work on her language skills. “I’m really trying,” she says, “to seize every opportunity to learn.” —SA |
