Local Teen Golfer Ready to Become Weather Woman
Lisa Patrick
Ashland Beacon
Boyd County Senior, Kristen Ramey, has plenty to be proud of as shetransitions from high school to Western Kentucky University. A certified weather spotter for the National Weather Service, she has already taken 27 dual credit hours that she will be able to transfer, won several scholarships, been presented with a multitude of awards over her high school career, was part of several school organizations, spent a lot of time volunteering, and still found time to excel on the Boyd County golf team because “I like to be challenged.”
Ramey joined the Girls Varsity Golf Team in 7th grade when she had just started playing a year earlier. Her school golfing career soon took off and shewon Regionals as a sophomore, tied for first in the Eastern Kentucky Conference as a junior, placed second in that same conference as a senior and was also awarded “Player of the Year” for the Eastern Kentucky Series in her senior year while she was the team captain.
Even though she was an award-winning member of the Future Farmers of America and was a part of many other clubs, Ramey said that her main extracurricular was Key Club. Ramey and a friend entered a Key Club digital poster competition recruiting other members. It was the first time that Boyd County had entered, and they took first place. Now, the poster will compete in the international competition held later this year in Atlanta.
Ramey had also won the Presidential Service Award for her volunteer work all four years of high school. She won the Silver Award her freshman and sophomore years of high school. Then, she won a Bronze her junior year before finally receiving a Gold Award her senior year. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to get any of the awards-150 hours for Bronze, 175 for Silver and 250 for Gold. Some of the places that she was able to earn volunteer hours were Hope’s Place, the Elks Club, Summer Motion, Winter Wonderland festival and the Ashland Christmas Parade.
Ramey also won the Youth Governor’s Service Award for Kentucky. Her senior project was selling jars of grape jelly to family and friends. As a certified floral designer, she was able to use the money she earned to create over one-hundred flower arrangements. She then hand-delivered all of those arrangements to the Boyd County Nursing Home and the Ashland Senior Center.
Even though she stayed busy with her school clubs and volunteer work, Ramey still managed to work six days a week at Country Garden Florist and take a Zumba class every Wednesday evening. She also participated in “SeniorAssassin” where the seniors sneak up on each other to shoot each other with water guns. Ramey said that it was so “highly competitive” that she “kept a water gun in her back seat.” Unfortunately, she was recently “shot” while at the library, so now she is “out.”
Ramey said that “Senior Assassin” is going to be her favorite part of herhigh school journey that she claimed was “honestly, a smooth ride but challenging in a good way.” She also loved doing Spirit Weeks-dressing up and getting to see everyone else’s designs.” She is going to miss her friends the most as she moves on to WKU to pursue a degree in Meteorology.
She chose WKU because, while not being extremely far from home, theirmeteorology program is ranked third in the nation. She has been interested in the weather since second grade when her class topic of the day was clouds. She found it super interesting and told her parents all about it. She stated, “I still tells my parents about the clouds.”
In her freshman year of high school, she became “super interested” inhurricanes. She would get up at 6:00 a.m. to turn on The Weather Channel. She hopes to be employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(N.O.A.A) one day, so she can do some tropical weather-based work. Ramey is really hoping she can do her weather work remotely though so she “can stay close to family.” She stated that she “doesn’t want to be on TV.” She wants to work behind the scenes.
She even helped clean up after some of the recent weather events in our area-picking up and discarding wood, glass, shutters, shingles, nails, and other pieces of people’s homes as she found them. Ramey hopes to come back hereand work once she has her meteorology degree so that she can “inspire others to follow their dreams” because “if you want to become a meteorologist, you can.”
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