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Student layers school, career |
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Tuesday, 25 September 2007 |
 Freshman geography major Bobbie Jo Swinson styles a customer’s hair at Haircut 101. Jon Heller
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With a snip here and a snip there, freshman geography major Bobbie Jo Swinson manages a career as a hair stylist at Haircut 101 while being a part-time student.
Swinson first discovered her passion for hair while in high school and decided to pursue it after a year at University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
“It’s been a long drawn out process of figuring out what I wanted to do. I guess I first wanted to do hair in high school,” Swinson said. “I’ve always known, too, that I wanted to be a scientist so whenever I graduated high school I went to UNCW.”
Swinson
had already been working in a salon as an assistant and decided that
she wanted to start hair school at Cape Fear Community College six
years ago. Once she finished school, she moved on to Bangz Hair Salon
in Wilmington for four and a half years.
Once she got her acceptance letter from Appalachian State, Swinson needed to find a salon to continue her career in.
“I decided on Haircut 101 because that is where everyone said to go
basically,” Swinson said. “That was the only salon here that I kept
getting repeat names for. I love it. I love my boss, I love the salon,
and I love that it’s so incorporated with the school because my
clientele is about 95 percent students.”
Swinson says she enjoys working in Boone much more than working in Wilmington.
“Everyone was really uptight about their hair and that’s just not fun
to me,” she said. “Here in Boone everybody is letting me play a lot-
everybody just wants my opinion more.”
Swinson has found that balancing a student, personal and working life
is much easier at Appalachian State than it was in Wilmington.
“The biggest difference that I’ve noticed with me being in school at
UNCW and now is that now I have direction, she said. “Now I know what I
want to do, I know the degree that I want to go for.”
Swinson decided to be a part-time student because she never wants to take on more than she can handle.
Her boss is laid back and allotts her time for school work and socializing.
When Swinson finishes her degree she hopes to do work for an energy company or with city planning and to focus on green energy.
While she works for her degree, Swinson plans to continue her job at
Haircut 101 and the positive and negative sides of being a stylist.
“Having hair all over my body all day long [is the worst part of being
a hair stylist],” Swinson said. “The only parts that I don’t like are
when people are completely hard to please. That’s nothing compared to
the people you make happy so you just have to take the bad with the
good. The good definitely outweighs the bad.”
Swinson feels the best part of her work is giving people a newfound self-confidence.
“When you really change the way that somebody thinks about themselves
and you know that they went out that night and had the best time and
just felt so good about themselves just because they looked good and
they felt like a different person,” she said.
Swinson also feels that anyone could be a hair stylist with the right
amount of practice and training but feels there are a couple
personality traits that are essential to being successful.
“I think you have to be very outgoing, be able to talk to people, be
able to be in the school setting or the town setting and walk up to
people and talk to them and tell them who you are and get them to come
in and see you,” she said.
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