MSU-MERIDIAN STUDENT VETERAN
AIMS TO SUPPORT OTHERS THROUGH SOCIAL WORK DEGREE By Lisa Sollie
Growing up, Karsten Taylor never thought about career options such as joining the military or serving others. He just wanted to stay out of jail. Taylor, a senior social work student at Mississippi State University-Meridian, was born on Tinker Air Force Base outside of Suffolk, England, where his father was stationed. The family eventually moved to Oklahoma and, after his father retired from the military, they settled in Middle City, where Taylor graduated from high school in 1995. When he was 19, Taylor became a father, dropped out of college and spent the next few years working in various bakeries around town until he was fired for being late “one too many times.” “My dad saw the road I was going down and basically told me, ‘Son, leave, join the military and don’t come back,’” Taylor said. “Although I’d always joked the military didn’t need any more Taylors, since my dad had served and two of my older brothers were serving at the time, I took his advice and enlisted, joining the U.S. Navy in 2001.”
Military Life
Mr. Karsten Taylor
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VISION 2021 | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES
Taylor’s first duty station was Kingsville Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, where, as a junior air traffic controller and facility watch supervisor, he was responsible for all activity on the airfield including the control tower. After Texas, he was stationed in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he spent three years with Tactical Air Control Squadron (TACRON 21) which has a mission of providing centralized planning, control, coordination and integration of amphibious and expeditionary combat air operations. While there, he was sent briefly to New Orleans in 2005 to help in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, completed a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf and eventually transferred in 2008 to NAS Meridian, spending five years there. While at NAS Meridian, he met LaShasta Metts whom he married in 2012. One year later, the couple transferred to Fleet Air Control and Surveillance Facility in Jacksonville, Florida, where they began working in The New Life Church prison ministry. “I’ll never forget the first time I went to this one prison and a prison guard said to me, ‘I treat these women with just as much respect as I would want because there are things I did in my past that could have landed me here but by the grace of God, they didn’t,’” Taylor said. “That stuck with me, so when I would go to help conduct services or hold Bible studies at the different facilities, I would always have that in the forefront of my mind. In a sense, I felt it was my duty, my obligation to give those
