My Passions in Life

 Welcome to my blog! I am so excited that you decided to visit today. I am Kayleigh Jarkowsky, a freshman Musical Theatre major with a minor in Marketing here at Ohio Northern. I wanted to dedicate my first blog to helping my readers learn a little bit more about me, my passions, and why I decided to come to ONU and study these two fields.

I was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, so life here in Ohio sure can be very different than my life back home. I have two loving parents, 4 siblings, and 2 sisters-in-law with whom I am very close, so living so far away from them is not easy some days. I am 19 years old, so I am the second to youngest in the sibling lineup. I also have one dog, named Maggie, who is a six-year-old Black Lab and Border Collie mix. Not seeing her every day is so hard, especially since I am a huge dog person! I was raised in a Christian household so faith is very important to me. 

My family!

I grew up in a very musically inclined family, and because of that, I started doing theatre at a very young age, which turned out to be my biggest passion in life and the reason I am now at ONU. While living at home I participated in 30+ shows and was part of a performing arts school from kindergarten to 10th grade. I attended a private Christian school for my junior and senior years of high school, and met my best friends there! 

My puppy, Maggie

I have always had a profound love for live theatre. It was mesmerizing for me to watch and even though I was a painfully shy child, I somehow ended up on the performing side of theatre and would not do anything different. I knew from a young age that a performing career was exactly what my life was made for. Although it is a cliche phrase, I truly believe I was born to perform. 

Me performing in my senior year musical, "Seussical"

I also had a love for creating, especially via social media, and was unsure of how that fit into my dream of being a performer. Throughout my high school years, I helped run my school's social media as well as the accounts for my student council and I loved being able to create that content and advertise the different events we had going on. I often was asked to do Instagram takeovers for theatres I was performing at because many people knew it was just something I loved to do. 

I took a special interest in vlogging, and my friends and I decided to create a show vlog for many of the shows we participated in together. Although they are just silly little videos, I love being able to have those memories to look back on. If that interests you, I will attach a link at the bottom to my YouTube where several of those vlogs are located.

Through these experiences, I quickly realized that I could pursue Musical Theatre as well as some sort of Social Media Marketing and use these skills to help theatres run their socials and have a side job for when I am not performing. I knew these were my true passions. When I visited ONU, I was able to speak to a student who had the same passions as I did and it was then that I knew I would thrive at this school and be able to learn about both of these fields and come out as a true creator on stage and on social media.

I am truly so excited to begin my journey here at Ohio Northern. I am especially excited to get started on taking classes for my marketing degree, and I hope you will follow along on my journey of getting degrees in these fields! I am involved in so much around campus, so this blog will be a mixture of all the different things I do and learn, so make sure to follow and check in weekly to see what I am up to! 

My Youtube!