Ashley Taylor

By Jordan Lea Smith

Ashley Taylor has a pleasant smile and a keen sense of fashion. Her hair is short, but always styled in a cute way. Taylor, a Houston sophomore, is waiting for the right amount of hours to become a junior. When asked what her classification was Taylor said, “well, a junior really soon.” Taylor is a radio/television major, public relations minor. She currently works at Aramark as a store manager. Taylor was the only child born to her parents. “Yeah, I’m a loner,” she said, but only in the sibling’s sense. Taylor has a warm personality and is easy to talk to.
All throughout her high school career Taylor participated in her school’s volleyball program. She said that she loved playing volleyball. She moved from a college prep-type high school to another school before she graduated for academic reasons, so she ended up playing volleyball for two different schools. In her original school they took all advance placement classes that tested their academic abilities. Because of this all of the students were very close in rank which placed Taylor, although she had around a 3.8, in the bottom half of her class. After the move she maintained her GPA and became 19th out of around 300 students, placing her in the top 10 percent and able to be accepted into any state supported university. Her GPA also enabled her to be entered into the National Honor Society. Before she graduated Taylor applied for the Warren Moon Scholarship. Many thousands of people apply for this scholarship each year and only seven receive it in the whole United States. In order to apply for the scholarship students had to have participated in some sort of high school sport and been in need of financial support for furthering their education.
After graduation Taylor hadn’t heard from them, so figured she was not one of the seven. “They called me one day in June and said that I’d won the scholarship and they were sending me to Vegas.” Taylor, along with the other six scholarship winners, one other from Texas, one from California, and four from Las Vegas, received an all expenses paid trip to Vegas to meet with many different sport’s stars and to help in the fundraising for next year’s scholarship. Some of the stars included Ozzie Davis and boxer Winkie Wright. Taylor said that she wasn’t ready to leave when it was time to but on the last day there she got to meet Winkie and that completed the trip for her.
They were treated like celebrities themselves, getting the VIP treatment at Vegas’s Mandalay Bay. “They told me when I went to check in at the hotel that I had to go to the VIP check-in. I thought that I could handle that.”
Other than the trip to Vegas she received the actual scholarship for $2,000 each year she spends at college. Here at Stephen F. Austin Taylor is involved with many things on campus. She is a RHA social co-chair, an activities coordinator for Big Jacks, and a Supreme Court Justice. Majoring in radio/television Taylor hopes to one day become a radio personality and then be the number one radio personality out there with her own show. She also wants to delve into club promotion and thinks that she might lean more towards advertising minor than public relations one.
After college she plans on moving to Atlanta, which is where her mother lives. Taylor knows that she wants to get married sometime in her life, just not anytime soon. When asked about children she just laughed. “Kids aren’t for me. My momma’s going to want grandkids, but oh well.”