Raising The Steaks

Tying it all Together

By: Leticia

With warmer weather and longer days, this could only mean one thing:  Summer is just around the corner!  What I like most about summer is getting to go home and help out on the ranch.  Only one thing stands between me and that trip home:  finals!  And while I should be studying for my statistics test, I am taking a break to reminisce over this semester.

With a full eighteen hour class load, I have had my fair share of homework, tests, and quizzes, but I think that the best measure of what I’ve learned is actually applying those skills I’ve learned in class to the real world.  What really surprises me is how much each of my classes relates to what the National Beef Ambassador team and I have been doing throughout the year.  So where exactly do those long hours of class lectures associate to what we do?  Well, here are just a few examples of how it all tied together.

Tuesdays and Thursdays started out at seven thirty in the morning, where I would go to my statistics class.  The relation:  When the National Beef Ambassador team went to Washington, DC, we actually got to tour the National Agriculture Statistics Service at the USDA.  It was there that we learned about their process to collect data and how that information eventually reaches out to the farmers and ranchers of our nation.  They taught us about the important role that these statistics serve in our economy and daily lives.  Well, I guess that stops my questioning about why Experimental Statistics is a required course in my major.

Next was my Meat Technology class.  Though it may have been my favorite, it was also my hardest.  A business major has no business in a science class!  What I liked most about it, though, was that it was the most relevant class to my job as a National Beef Ambassador.  We learned about what increases the tenderness of meat, about the meat processing line, and for our final we actually have to read an article about beef production and find the false statements and fix them….does this sound familiar at all?  One homework assignment that we had to do was visit the University of Nebraska’s bovine myology tutorial, which I had a hard time finding, until one day I was poking around on beef.org and found a direct link to it.  In the middle of a lecture on how to improve tenderness, I was reminded of our very first trip we took as a team was to the Certified Angus Beef headquarters in Wooster, OH where John Stika and the rest of the staff taught us about the “Science Behind the Sizzle,” and what products they had to offer consumers.

Speaking of consumers-I also had an agricultural marketing class that helped me realize different ways to create a product that consumers wanted.  The teacher lectured over ways to increase consumer demand, which is one goal of the producer funded beef check-off. Just as in my World Food Problems class, we discussed current issues facing the agriculture industry and finding that median between producers and consumers.

If there was ever any doubt in my mind about not learning enough in school, or worse, learning a lot of useless knowledge, it has all been put to rest.  In just a few days, Las Cruces will be behind me, my room mate will be left to man the fort on her own, and Hewey, our roping dummy in the back yard, will be given a few months of rest in our absence.  The Spring ’08 Semester will be over, books and notebooks will be closed and left on shelves to collect dust, and we students will trade hours of class work for hours of internship work.  But lessons learned in those closed pages of notes and in classrooms now closed will not be forgotten, instead they will be put to use, in our jobs, our personal lives, and our efforts in spreading the truth about beef.