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college and her FFA classmates took aim at the agriculture-focused schools, Dru set her sights on SCAD. Her goal was to study fashion design and eventually enter the fashion business. SCAD, she says, was perfect. “It has a project-based, hands-on curriculum,” she explains. “I knew I’d be completely stimulated all the time.” SOMETIMES, PLANS CHANGE That was the original plan. However, thanks to FFA, reality unfolded in a slightly different direction. Dru, who first joined the North Oconee FFA chapter as a freshman, says FFA was at first a way
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for her to keep busy – and stay awake. But the more she got involved, the more she liked the courses she took, the competitions she entered and the projects she did. A landscape design class enthralled her; she loved how it combined drawing, math, science and nature. Later, as a senior competing in the nursery landscape career development event (CDE), which emphasizes landscape architecture, her team won state. This meant Dru and her teammates would be competing in nationals during her freshman year of college. Preparing for the national event took up much of Dru’s time the
summer after graduation. And by the time fall came around, and her team took fourth, she had a change of heart. Fashion, she says, was no longer her top priority, at least when it came to her future career. “I really fell in love with all the things I was studying,” she says. “I loved doing the math, the drawing, and learning how plants worked or didn’t work in certain places.” And so it hit her: Instead of studying fashion, she’d major in interior design, which focuses not only on decorating but also on architecture. In addition, she’d minor in cultural landscape.
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