Matt Avery and Elise Bullard won the Leader of the Pack scholarships at Saturday’s Homecoming game. The $1,000 award is given based on service and leadership merits.

Matt Avery

All throughout his life in small town Winterville, NC, Matt Avery had always been interested in sports. He played baseball since he was young and began playing golf in high school. Along with sports, Avery said he kept busy by joining organizations in high school and participating in service projects to help his community. His involvement with both sports and service organizations would carry on in college and help him decide what career he wanted to pursue.

In high school, Avery was a member of Key Club, where he participated in service projects with other high school students. Upon arriving at the University, Avery said he knew he wanted to be involved with things going on around campus and in the community.

“As soon as I got to State, I decided that I wanted to be involved,” Avery said. “I wanted to jump into the opportunities of service and leadership that the campus has to offer and I’m very excited about meeting people. One of the first clubs I joined was Circle K International, which is a service organization and that really led to me becoming more involved on campus.”

According to Avery, Circle K gives a lot of focus to the youth of Wake County. Avery works with children at Dillard Drive Elementary School as part of a mentoring program.

“I eat lunch with some fifth graders” he said. “We also do the haunted house with the Raleigh Boys & Girls Club. What we really are doing is giving them a safe environment so they can enjoy Halloween, because they might not come from the safest neighborhoods. We’re just trying to give them a safe and secure environment.”

Through his involvement with Circle K, Avery said he became involved with the Tompkins Textile Student Council.

“It was great to become a part of that organization because it really allowed me to become involved with many college of textiles events and learn a lot more about organizations in the college of textiles,” he said. “That really branched me out into the textiles engineering society, and I am the event coordinator of that organization.”

It was his involvement in sports that would push Avery to look into a career that would mix all of the skills he learned in high school and college with sports.

“It would be my dream job to combine my love for sports and my passion for problem-solving and engineering and high performance materials, especially in the sporting goods industry,” Avery said. “It’s cutting edge, it’s very innovative, and I think that would just be an exciting, fun job from something that I really enjoy, working in that industry. The root of it is my love of sports.”

Though he hasn’t definitely decided on a career choice, Avery said he has a couple of options.

“I’m really trying to keep my options open,” Avery said, “but I’m very interested in the use of high-performance materials in sporting goods, so maybe working for a golf club company or something of that nature.”

Elise Bullard

Growing up in Asheboro, NC, Elise Bullard said she had a pretty normal life. All of that changed when her grandmother was in a car accident. Concerned for her grandmother, Bullard said she went with her to occupational therapy. It was there Bullard said she found her calling in life.

“My grandmother was in a car accident a few years back,” Bullard said. “Whenever she went to occupational therapy, I saw what an impact occupational therapists have on their patients. I also sing to people in nursing homes and with things like that I realized that I wanted to work in a geriatric facility and also do occupational therapy just because of the impact that they have on their patients.”

Bullard said she wanted to come to a large, division one school, and N.C. State was her best choice.

Though she hopes to help the elderly in her future, Bullard said she has participated in several activities that helped people of all ages.

“While I’ve been at State, I was a team captain for the Relay for Life team in the honors program,” she said. “My team was a first-year team and we actually ended up fundraising the most money, with over $3,800. I really want to continue to do Relay for Life, probably for the rest of my life.”

Bullard has also taught horseback riding lessons at her family’s horse stable since she was 15 and said she continues to do so in college

Through a partnership that N.C. State has with Centennial Middle School, Bullard has tutored in math and science to all grade levels. She said she has also volunteered at a nursing home.

Bullard said she wants to use the values she learned at home to give back to the community.

“Any time that I have, it’s felt like that’s what I should be doing,” she said. “There’s so many opportunities around me all the time and it would seem like kind of a waste if I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities that are around me. My college experience is about giving back and doing the best I could.”

Coming to the University honors program showed Bullard different routes she could take and different things she could do to reach out to the community. Bullard said she hopes to get other students to reach out as well.

“I think it would be very helpful to N.C State to create a community service fair,” she said. “They have graduate school fairs, they have career fairs, all kinds of things like that, but they don’t have a community service fair. It would be easier for people to be involved in community service if they didn’t have to be involved in an organization to do it. It’s almost like they just don’t have anywhere to go to do that.”

Bullard said one of the things that affected her outlook on life was her study abroad trip to Guatemala.

“I studied abroad in Guatemala over the summer with Study Abroad N.C. State,” she said. “Going to Guatemala and seeing the state that a a lot of those people live in made me realize how blessed I am.”

Bullard said the biggest impact on her life came from the people who surrounded her growing up.

“My family has always been very supportive of everything I’ve done,” she said. “They pushed me to become the person I am today.”