Senior Emily Carlisle Thankful She Came to BC

“Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if it had been my plan,” said Bluefield College senior Emily Carlisle. “Overall, I am glad I came to Bluefield.”

Carlisle has lived in Bluefield ever since she moved here when she was seven years old. After a few setbacks during her college application process with another school, she was interviewed for the Presidential Scholarship at BC, which she received. As a result, she has called this campus home for the past three years.

Carlisle is a double major in communication and graphic communication. Her hard work throughout the years was recently recognized by the BC community. In fall of 2019, she was awarded the Shott Excellence in Media Student Scholarship Award, presented annually to an outstanding BC communications student.

In addition, Carlisle belongs to Alpha Chi National Honor Society, Kappa Pi National Art Society, was the former editor-in-chief of the college’s student newspaper, The Rampage, is a resident assistant (RA), and is an American Sign Language (ASL) teaching assistant.

“I am really glad that I met the people I have,” said Carlisle about her thoughts on ending up at Bluefield College. “My professors and advisors are all fantastic. They are really great teachers who genuinely care about you and will go the next step to make sure your advising is right, to make sure you are doing well in your classes, and that you are okay.”

Carlisle said the favorite thing she has been a part of at BC is being a part of the spring 2019 student mission team that traveled to Ecuador to share the Gospel.

“I have had every missions experience that you can have in college,” she said. “I have done close domestic trips, the overseas trip where you are ‘boots on the ground,’ and helping start a church.”

Carlisle said the mission trip to Ecuador was very structured with an agenda every day, which is something she added is not very common in central and South American countries.

“Just to kind of see how both of those were polar opposites,” she said. “For one, you are doing all of this work you are not going to see the fruit from, and last year’s you could immediately see your hard work because the kids would hug you and would say ‘thank you.’ They would show with their actions that they loved, appreciated you and how the work you were putting in was paying off.”

This spring, Carlisle will head to Madrid, Spain for another mission trip, accompanied by other female classmates and Professor Henry Clary.

“I am super pumped about Madrid this year,” she said. “I don’t know what to expect, which is kind of good. I am terrified because we are talking to college students, which both challenges and terrifies me in a good way. There is a really small team of us going, and I think that is going to be a really cool experience. I have never spent a whole lot of time in a big city so I don’t know what to expect because I have grown up in Bluefield. It will be a little taste of what a big city feels like.”

Carlisle used to aspire to be a journalist, but now she is leaning more toward public relations as her future profession.

“It (PR) is so much more me,” she said. “It is so much more positive and light-hearted and shows the good in things. I would love to travel and show off really incredible organizations, towns, and be like ‘this is the good that is happening in the world.'”

Carlisle would like to show consumers whatever company she is working for is actually doing good in the world with the money being sent in.

“I don’t know if it would be PR for an agency and I would just work with these nonprofit companies, or if it would be for a specific company and then that is how I would do it,” she said. “If that could all roll together into one job, I would be so pumped.”

After graduating from BC in May, Carlisle plans to continue her education by pursuing a master’s degree in digital media and advertising online at Liberty University. When asked what advice she would give to fellow classmates, she said “stress clean” and “be authentic.”

“I always tell new students that it is okay to stress clean,” Carlisle said. “When I am really stressed, I feel this need to clean. My freshman year, I would wash every dish I had, and they would all be clean. It is actually so good for you because you get some of that stress out, you feel really productive, and then you see your work pay off as you are going, and it gives you that little confidence boost to go and tackle an assignment. For any BC student and their life in general, I would say to be really authentic and to not let your words speak for you, but let your actions speak for you.”