JWU students learn to get back up in saddle

HORSE POWER: Crystal Taylor, director of riding, assistant professor, and dressage team coach, conducts a class at the Johnson & Wales Equestrian Center. / PBN PHOTO/ STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS
HORSE POWER: Crystal Taylor, director of riding, assistant professor, and dressage team coach, conducts a class at the Johnson & Wales Equestrian Center. / PBN PHOTO/ STEPHANIE ALVAREZ EWENS

When Johnson & Wales University senior Julia McNellis was just 7 years old, she fell off a horse and, as the saying goes, got right back on the saddle.
She’s stayed there ever since as, she said, she fell in love with what she hopes to soon make her profession at a very young age.
“My mom’s friend put me on one of her very old, rickety, pastor horses and he freaked out because a big gathering of geese flew up and he was blind,” McNellis said. “I fell. I looked up at my mom and said, ‘I want to do this.’ I went to camp, took lessons and got my own horse.”
Several years later she arrived at Johnson & Wales for formal training. She’ll graduate this spring with a bachelor of science in equine business management – riding.
JWU’s Center for Equine Studies may not be the most well-known program on campus but it is one of the school’s most innovative. Its inception was centered on creating a program in which students would have the best chance of professional success within the industry.
Though perhaps most famous as a culinary-arts and hospitality-education institution, JWU was founded in 1914 as a business school and offers several degree programs within its college of business – as well as in the school of technology and school of arts and sciences – to an average of 10,000 undergraduate students per semester.
The university was allowed to start awarding baccalaureate degrees in 1970.
In 1980, then-university Chancellor Morris Gaebe and Col. John F. McNulty, who then was dean of students, took a personal interest in horses and results of a student survey that showed interest in sport riding to develop a certificate program in equine management. That was worked into an associate degree program within the school’s college of business.
Beth Beukema, the Center for Equine Studies director, came onboard in 1983 and helped establish the bachelor degree program.
“It was one of the first programs to have a business emphasis. At the time the program was developed, equine was mostly in the sciences,” said Beukema, who earned a master’s in animal science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and taught there for six years, then ran her own riding-school business before joining JWU. “Many have copied across the country but those are still equine programs within universities that are more of an animal-science program. We’re a business program with an equine emphasis.” The Center for Equine Studies offers bachelor of science programs in equine business management and in equine business-management – riding.
The riding degree offers an instructor-trainer concentration in which students earn American Red Cross First Aid and CPR certification. Those students may then go on to become licensed riding teachers through a Massachusetts examination.
Students take business and general-studies courses and science-based classes concentrated on the functioning of the horse in such topics as anatomy, disease, genetics and physiology.
The curriculum is meant to give students a combination of skills in management, business practice and equine experience.
Students who also want to include a riding component to their education would be prepared for a career in teaching, training or farm management through curriculum combining riding instruction and hands-on equine experience.
“Most of our students already have a lot of background with horses,” said Crystal Taylor, a center faculty member who has taught at JWU since 1996. “The equine industry is really huge. I think [since I’ve been here] the program has probably doubled in size. It’s definitely gotten bigger and bigger.”
There are 110 students enrolled in the program, representing 1.1 percent of the undergraduate population. Most of the students, Taylor said, like McNellis, elect to take the riding curriculum. Admittance requires a DVD showing riding competencies. Admission is said to be competitive.
Students regularly ride competitively. Last May, the Dressage Team took first place honors at the Intercollegiate Dressage Association’s National Championships at Centenary College in Hackettstown, N.J.
Riding classes and training are conducted at the Equine Center in Rehoboth, Mass., which is located on 31 acres of farmland and which won the 2009 Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation’s Horse Farm of Distinction award.
The center’s faculty is small, too. In addition to Beukema and Taylor, there are two other faculty members. Gilberto Gonzalez graduated from the riding program in August 2011. He is the barn manager at River House Hanoverians, a breeding farm in Williston, Fla. He began with the company interning while in school when it was located in New Hampshire.
“I really liked everything [at JWU]. It’s well-rounded. I just thought they were really good at complementing the courses and giving you an insight as to what the industry is really about,” Gonzalez said.
Program graduates, Beukema said, are split in their career choices. About half go into hands-on equine work at barns, or teaching riding or into the veterinary field to become office technicians. The other half go into corporate jobs such as at public relations firms that specialize in equine events or equine-goods companies.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that projected job growth from 2010-2020 for farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers would decline by about 8 percent. But the outlook for animal care and service workers over the same time frame showed a projected 23 percent growth, faster than the average industry growth.
There are other area programs, including one in animal science with an equine emphasis at University of Massachusetts Amherst and a small program in equine management at Mount Ida College in Newton, Mass.
“You never know what’s going to happen, so you always need a back up,” said Kristen Sarcone, a senior in her last program trimester. “A lot of other [equine] programs didn’t have that so I knew right away Johnson & Wales was the right decision for me.”
Sarcone, 21, grew up taking riding lessons on Long Island, N.Y. She’s always wanted, she said, to do something for work with horses. She’s working this semester at SmartPak, a company that produces horse supplements and other products in Natick, Mass. The company employs several program graduates and Sarcone would love to work there but also is considering other post-graduate options, including JWU’s one-year MBA program.
McNellis is going to work on the managerial business end at a breeding farm in upstate New York after she completes a summer study-abroad program in Germany. •

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