Flooding the City with Blue and Gold

By Sarah K. Correll, Indiana FFA Organization
State Secretary

Your 2011-2012 FFA State Secretary is a sweet tea drinking, livestock showing, reasons loving advocate for agriculture. Sarah Correll is from Peru, Indiana and recently graduated from North Miami High School after four years of balancing class, livestock shows, judging contests, honor society, drama productions, and everything else she could get involved with. She is extremely thankful and very excited to be spending this year serving the members of Indiana FFA and helping to spread the Indiana FFA message!

Indianapolis will soon be opening its doors to more than 50,000 middle and high school students from across the nation.  These students will be from all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, but they will all be in the city to enjoy one event: the National FFA Convention.  National convention will draw in agricultural education students and FFA members to participate in a variety of activities, including sessions with impressive keynote speeches, competitions, concerts, and the career show.  Most will also be staying in the Indianapolis area for the duration of the four day event.

As an Indiana FFA State Officer, I started the week a little bit earlier than most.  Most members will be spending Wednesday, October 19 through Saturday, October 22 at convention; however, my team and I  headed to Indy on Sunday the 16^th as we serve as official convention delegates.  As delegates we have the opportunity to meet with state officers and other members from all of the other states to discuss issues that are currently facing our organization.  These issues range from establishing contests for collegiate members to continuing the floriculture competition, and I am personally very excited to be on the Agriculture Experience Committee.  My committee will be discussing potential programs about production agriculture for our high school membership, which means that along with meeting FFA members from across the country, we will also get to talk about traditional agriculture and how we can get back to our agricultural roots.

Outside of committee work my team and I will also be attending the sessions to hear the National FFA Officers and other speakers speak, going to the concert, and frequenting the career show.  The career show hosts agricultural companies and colleges from across the nation and is a great place to meet people and to learn about the agricultural industry.  We will also be meeting up with the hundreds of Indiana students that will be attending the convention to see the sights and to compete.  Indiana members will be representing the state well in contests ranging from dairy cattle evaluation to prepared public speaking and from agribusiness management to beef production proficiency.  We wish every one of them good luck and hope to see them recognized on stage as a top four finalist or even as a national winner!

Indiana will also be represented by Morgan Gadd as our national officer candidate.  Miss Gadd has taken the last few months off of college to study and prepare to run for a prestigious position representing and serving the over 500,000 National FFA members as a National FFA Officer.  She will go through a variety of tests, interviews, and speaking exercises before convention officially begins, and we hope to hear her name announced as a national officer during the final session Saturday!

As a team and as Indiana FFA members, we couldn't wait to make the short trip to Indianapolis for the National FFA Convention!  Convention is an exciting time of reuniting with friends, taking care of business, competing, learning, and celebrating success, and we are all especially blessed to host it right here in Indiana.  It will surely be a week that none of us will forget!