It’s always fun to introduce something new in our magazine, and this Intercollegiate Issue kicks off a feature we plan to repeat annually, called the Career Guide (p. 8). We’ll be highlighting some of the jobs that young people who want to be involved with horse sports can do, other than riding or grooming horses. This time you can meet an equine dentist, an extension specialist who’s also a teaching professor, a horse show photographer, and an equine lawyer. Actually, these careers are just the tip of the iceberg of jobs that are a part of the horse world.

There’s really no shortage of careers associated with or related to horses. It just takes some creativity, a useful background, a little bit of luck, and a passion, as columnist Linda Allen observes (p. 34).

We’ve hired more than a dozen people for the editorial staff and more than four times as many interns over the last 20 years. And I can assure you that the ones who’ve been the best employees and profited the most from their experience here–and whose time here we enjoyed the most–have that passion. They started with an intense desire to write about horses and horse people, to learn about the horse world and about equine journalism (at least as we practice it here), and were eager about every assignment we gave them, no matter what it was. The interns who were the hardest triers were the people we later hired for a position here or have used extensively as freelance writers ever since.

But we’ve had to survive too many interns who only cared to do certain assignments or who arrived believing that they knew more than we did. I’ve always told our intern applicants that what they’d take away from us really depended on them, on how much they participated in the creation of each week’s magazine. It’s really pretty simple: Have initiative–offer an idea or to undertake an assignment–and you’ll learn the most and earn our confidence.

In any job, your advancement, longevity and salary depend on successfully completing the tasks that are your responsibility. Every good employer knows that when he hires someone, especially for an entry level position, a learning curve will follow. He knows that new employees will need to learn the system and the intricacies of the operation; they may even have to learn new skills. Therefore, responsible employers will accommodate slowness, inefficiency or even mistakes in the early days. But what they want to see, if they’re going to keep a struggling employee, is a clear devotion to learning the tasks and mastering the skills–and, above all, improvement.

It’s just like training a horse, especially a young horse. When you first sit on babies, you can barely steer because they don’t really understand your aids, so they can’t immediately perform complicated flatwork exercises or even jump anything but the most elemental and tiny fences. So you have to have patience with them, but you’ll look forward to working them each day if they demonstrate willingness and eagerness. It’s the same dealing with the people with whom you work. Who wants to be stuck at the office or the barn each day with someone who isn’t really interested in being there?

So my suggestion to young people is to think of yourself as a young horse and bring the kind of attitude that you’d like to see in your own horse to your career search and its development. You’ll find that it goes a long, long way.