Pettit Ready for New Challenge in AmeriCorps

A desire to help others motivated Arkansas Tech University student Ashleigh Pettit from an early age.

As she prepares to graduate with her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology at the end of the fall 2015 semester, the Mountain Home product is also preparing to pursue a new adventure with AmeriCorps, a federal program that has allowed 900,000 Americans to contribute more than 1.2 billion service hours to communities around the United States since 1994.

“I found out about AmeriCorps through my research about Peace Corps,” said Pettit. “The Peace Corps has always been a goal of mine since I was a little girl. I was 6 years old and telling my mom I was going to a different continent to help people. My older brother recently graduated from Georgetown University, and he has a lot of friends who work with AmeriCorps. He helped me learn more about it, and after talking to a couple of AmeriCorps representatives, I decided to apply. I heard back from them, and my Peace Corps representative said that working with AmeriCorps would not hinder my ability to apply with them in the future, so I accepted the position.”

During her senior year at Mountain Home High School, Pettit originally thought about attending a private college in Missouri. One visit to Russellville helped redirect her thinking.

“I started looking at schools in Arkansas, and Tech was one that I had known from basketball camps,” said Pettit. “My mom and I came and took a campus tour, and we both loved how beautiful the campus is and the fact that you can walk across it in 10 minutes. It felt like a second home to me.”

Pettit found new ways to serve others at Arkansas Tech, including participation in an Alternative Spring Break trip to San Antonio, Texas, where she worked with a food bank to assist the food insecure.

“I don’t know if it was the atmosphere I was raised in or the people I surrounded myself with or just plain personality traits, but I’ve always been involved in school and that continued on in college,” said Pettit. “I’m president of Delta Zeta this year, and we do a lot with service. It’s something that is near and dear to my heart. Sometimes it’s hard to see the impact that you make since many of the organizations are far away, so I thought the chance to do hands-on work and to be able to touch, see and experience the difference I was making would be awesome.”

With AmeriCorps, Pettit will be located somewhere in a 10-state region in the north central United States. Potential projects she could be assigned to include natural and other disasters, infrastructure improvements, environmental stewardship and conservation, energy conservation and urban and rural development. She is due to report to Iowa in February.

She believes the experience will benefit her career goal of entering mental health counseling. She is less certain that she is ready for the weather.

“I was born and raised in Arkansas, so I’ve never experienced a true winter,” said Pettit. “I think that will be a little bit of a shock.”

Aside from the need to shop for a heavy duty coat, Pettit believes she is equipped to take on whatever challenges she will face in AmeriCorps.

“I’m really excited to meet the team I will be working with and our team leaders,” said Pettit. “I hope to be able to engage members of the community, ask them where they are now, how they got there and where they want to go next. I hope I come away with some new perspectives and use it to better myself. I’m really looking forward to getting to know a lot of different kinds of people. I think what I’ve learned here at Tech, and what the faculty and staff have done for me, have really prepared me. I’m very fortunate and thankful. Looking back, I could not have picked a better university to set me up for success.”