Kristen Lee ’17

Please describe your position and what you enjoy most about it.

New Life Ranch is a summer camp and retreats center. I am over the care and creation of activities at Frontier Cove. On the camp side, I am in charge of the summer activity team for hiring, training and over all management of those college students. For the retreat side, I get to contact group leaders and help plan out what activities they want to do during their stay at NLR. I also get to host some of the groups while they are here. Each season brings a different joy and challenge, but I crave both!

What aspects of your HLGU experience helped you prepare for your career?

I had felt the call to camping ministry while I was attending HLGU. The program I chose helped give me practical skills for a multitude of activities, that I get to do in my daily work, but also how to teach and manage classes, guests and campers, while they are onsite using our facilities and amenities. Throughout my classes, I also learned how to work with a team to get work done, problem solve our way through different situations and the importance of throwing out ideas to work with until we had the best option that I might not have otherwise come up with on my own. I am forever grateful for my time at HLGU!

What have you enjoyed most about your career?

I love being able to serve groups that come to our site. I enjoy filling needs and making their experience as smooth and fun as possible. I also really enjoy getting to hire and lead a team of college students every summer. I get to pour into them and watch the Lord move through them as they are leading activities and planting seeds into the campers lives. There is nothing quite like it! I was able to take a nontraditional approach to get to the position I am in now. While I was an apprentice, I worked in most departments here at New Life Ranch including: maintenance, housekeeping, hosting, kitchen and finally activities. Having been able to see so many aspects of what it takes to make NLR operate helps me appreciate just how hard each department works behind the scenes to make camp and all of our retreats happen. It’s true that it takes a village, well in our case a little western “town” in the middle of Oklahoma, and I wouldn’t change my village for much else in this world!

Please share a specific example from your career or life when the skills you gained at HLGU helped you most.

Over the past couple of years I have been working on redoing/updating our disc golf course. During my undergrad program I was able to take a couple disc golf classes, which was my first exposure to the game. I referenced the things I learned there in creating our course. Remembering the courses we played on, what different aspects of each course worked well and not so well, what signs, maps and rules I liked best to create our current course, Ring Around the Cove. Throughout this process, I have fully redone and mapped out a 9-hole course, created a map, added it to the UDisc app, and created a custom logo and got discs with it on them. The most rewarding part is watching guests play rounds on this course and hear about their successes but also how challenging some of the holes are and how they want to beat their score the next time they play.

Do you have any tips to share with students interested in this field?

Have an open mind when looking and applying for internships and jobs. Sometimes getting your foot in the door in an area that is not necessarily your top choice at an organization you really like and align with is far better than holding out for the perfect job that may never come. I started in maintenance then moved to housekeeping and then settled into the activity role (my top choice). You never know what you will learn and how helpful that will be as you move upward or on to your next role.

What on-campus activities were you involved in at HLGU?

Softball all four years
Student Activity Committee
Residential Advisor