Cob Jockey

It was January of 2009, and I was a junior in college, majoring in Equine Studies. Why? I still had no idea, except that I loved horses. My advisor, Dr. Marks, had patiently worked through it with me since before I was a freshman. The previous three years had gone something like this:

“I kind of think I might want to be a vet.”

“There’s no ‘kind of’ with being a vet. You either REALLY want to be a vet, or you don’t.”

“Oh. I guess I don’t.”

During one such repetition of this conversation in my sophomore year, she said, “You know, it’s easy to think of things you want to do - a lot of things sound good until you do them. I want you to pay attention to the things you don’t want to do. That’s going to tell us a lot more.”

A year or so later, in January of 2009, that advice changed my life.

The woman herself, on my graduation day

That weekend, much like this past one, the temperature didn’t get above 8F and a perfect storm of things led to me having to be at the barn for 13-14 hours every day for four days where everything took longer in the snow. I was too exhausted to shower or eat and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow every night.

Me in barn clothes after a similarly exhausting weekend freshman year

At some point during all that, I found myself daydreaming about my other work/study job in the IT department. I wondered what projects they were working on and what ridiculous requests the help desk had entertained since I’d last been there. I bet they’d showered in the last four days.

And I realized.

I don’t want to do this, Dr. Marks.

I don’t want to dedicate my entire life to cleaning stalls and scrubbing buckets.

I want to solve complex problems and work with awe-inspiring technology and take showers.

It hit me like a lightning bolt. I love IT. Like, I really love IT. 

Three months later, over spring break, my beloved IT department would “P2V” everything – move our servers from physical boxes to VMware virtualized ones, a technology that would change the world (literally, look it up) and my life. 

When the dust settled, one of the IT staff members dragged me into the server room and excitedly said “There’s a server moving from this box to this box RIGHT NOW and people are USING IT and no one has any idea!” His excitement was contagious, and that “I love IT” moment from a few months earlier sharply crystallized into “I want to do this VMware thing for a career.” 

16 years and 10 months after that, “that VMware thing” has taken me places I never dreamed I’d be capable of going, solving problems for the largest companies on the planet, and I got there with passion, luck, and yes, an Equine Studies degree, which I did end up finishing even though I knew it wasn’t going to be my career.

And on weekends like this last one, when my boarders can’t get to the barn to help me and I haven’t showered for four days, just like that weekend in 2009, I’m reminded that it’s okay to love horses but not make a career out of them. It’s okay to say “I don’t want to do this” – at least, not all the time, and to find a way to fit horses into your life in a way that works for you.

After all, if it wasn’t for “that VMware thing”, I wouldn’t be financially capable of owning the barn. In a roundabout way, my equine studies degree has gotten me right where I need to be with horses, and I have Dr. Marks and "What do you NOT want to do?" to thank for that.