My name is Allie Wright. I graduated a semester early from Chapman High School in Inman, SC. I started online college through St. Andrews University, which has an exceptional equestrian program, because I thought I wanted to own my own dressage training business one day. After a terrible accident on a horse last summer, I realized this path wasn’t for me. I decided to go to Greenville Technical College to find out who I was without horses.

Since it was a turning point for you, will you tell us a little bit about your accident?

I’ve grown up with horses my entire life. Throughout high school, I was part of the US Equestrian Interscholastic Athlete Program, which allowed me to log my hours of equestrian activity so that it could be counted as a high school sport. I trained with Button Baker, a well-known coach, clinician, and former Grand Prix competitor, to try and qualify for the Young Rider Olympic team. I also hoped to build my career as a working student – which is kind of like a paid internship – at Tryon International Equestrian Center. So I was pretty deep in the horse world.

One day last summer, I was a riding a horse on the trail, and a deer jumped right out in front of us. The horse spooked and bucked me off. I don’t remember much about it – just that I wasn’t able to hang on.

I was knocked down in the woods for I don’t know how long until they came and found me.

I was wearing a helmet, but when I fell, I hit the back of my head, and the whole helmet cracked. The impact resulted in a Grade 4 concussion that really messed with my emotions and made me a completely different person.

My pediatric doctor said to me, “If you didn’t have a helmet on, you would be in ICU right now. This could’ve been fatal.”

I did ride again (and still do occasionally, if it’s a safe trail horse). But I had a situation where I got on a different horse, and he started spooking. All I could think about was my doctor’s words after my accident, and I had a complete panic attack.

That was the turning point for me. That was when I decided that I couldn’t take that kind of risk anymore, especially as a job. It just wasn’t right for me anymore.

So you made an unlikely shift – to dental hygiene. How did that come about?

After my concussion, I grew really burnt out with the horse world. People continued to have so many demanding expectations of me and didn’t understand that I was trying to recover from my injury.

One day I was at the dentist – and I absolutely love my dental hygienist. We talk about all kinds of things. I feel like she could be a therapist!

I was telling her my concerns, and she was listening and trying to help me out. Then she said, “I think you could be a great dental hygienist. You should job shadow me and see how you like it.”

So I did. What really stood out to me wasn’t the teeth cleaning part or the giving shots part. It was her relationships with her clients. She had a lot of older clients – I absolutely love older people! – and she would sit with them and talk with them and make them feel comfortable.

That experience made me go all in. I decided to enroll at Greenville Tech, because that’s the technical college closest to me with a dental program, and start in anatomy.

But you quickly learned that dental hygiene wasn’t the best fit after all…

It wasn’t! I’m a perfectionist and a planner, and I want to do well no matter what I’d doing. But when I got into the class, a lot of my classmates had already taken chemistry because they knew they were going into dental hygiene. I had not. I studied and studied and studied, but I felt like I was behind from the start.

To add to that, my concussion specialist said that it would take a very long time for my memory to come back and for things to be able to stick. And that just wasn’t going to work with an anatomy class, where you have to memorize the names of so many bones.

I was beating myself up because I wasn’t as successful as a I wanted to be, and not having everything planned out was really bothering me.

How did you get yourself out of that confusing spot?

With a lot of help from the Scholars program. Ms. Colletti is my advisor and teacher for Freshman Seminar in that program. She’s always saying that if you don’t like what you’re doing and you can’t see yourself doing it, that may be a sign that a particular program is not for you. And if that’s the case, it’s okay to switch your major. It’s not going to be the end of the world!

I expressed my concerns to her, and she led me to the PathwayU career assessment. When I took it, dental hygiene did not appear on there anywhere at all! First was education. Second was marketing and sales. And third was human services.

I talked to the Career Specialist, Mr. Grant, and he asked what drew me to dental hygiene. I told him that I loved the relationships my hygienist built with her clients. He looked at me and said, “You know, you don’t have to be in people’s teeth all day to form relationships with people.” He was right. I realized that I didn’t have to take all these sciences that I’m not interested in to find something that I really do enjoy.

So you shifted gears – again! Now your focus is on marketing and sales, and you hope to transfer to USC Upstate when you graduate from Greenville Tech.

Yes. If I had stuck with dental hygiene, which takes about 3 to 3½ years to complete, there was no reason for me to transfer anywhere. Now with marketing, I plan to transfer and get my bachelor’s degree.

But it makes so much more sense to start at Greenville Tech. College is expensive, and right now, I’m getting the LIFE Scholarship and Lottery Tuition Assistance, and that covers my costs. To me, that seems like the way to go.

Plus, I like the way the instructors at a technical college really focus on individuality. They appreciate that everybody is different. I mean, there are parents going back to school to get a degree. There are people in the Early College, so they’re still in high school. There are people my age. With such a mix, the instructors have to know how to adapt to that.

After Greenville Tech and USC Upstate, what might life look like for you in, say, five or ten years?

I have a couple of ideas. My dad works in sales at Anixter. He said he may be able to help me get a starter job there, where I have the opportunity to move up in the company. The Career Specialist mentioned becoming a pharmaceutical rep, which would be cool too. And if there were job opportunities in marketing at, say, Tryon International Equestrian Center, which is near my house, that might be a possibility.

But I’m excited to learn more about Summit Hills, a retirement community in Spartanburg. My boyfriend’s mom works there doing cottage and apartment sales. I’m supposed to job shadow her soon because, as I said earlier, I love older people. So that should be fun – and, to me, that sounds like the best match right now!