Hi! My name is Tom Bowman, I’m 23 years old, and I currently teach English at a public high school in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. As a sophomore in high school in Des Moines, Iowa, I never would have guessed that I would eventually end up in an unfamiliar country over five thousand miles away from home. Yet, here I am! As I look back on how I got here, I realize that it all stems from one particular experience during the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school.
In the spring of my sophomore year, I learned about the opportunity to attend the 2012 Iowa HOBY Seminar. My summer was already quickly filling up with football camps and work, but a school counselor approached me and convinced me to reserve one short weekend for the event. Frankly, I really didn’t understand what I was signing up for at the time. I had a vague idea that the seminar focused on development of youth leaders, but I didn’t know much else. When my mom first dropped me off, the energy immediately overwhelmed me. HOBY was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
In all the times that I’ve tried to describe HOBY to people, I have never quite been able to find the right words. To me, HOBY represents an environment bursting with life that does everything to foster youth leadership and civic engagement. In other words, it is a culture designed to help bright young people realize their potential to create the future. Over the course of the seminar, HOBY challenged me to connect with peers across the state and to form an understanding of how we could individually and collectively affect change in our communities and throughout the world. It was one of the quickest, most social, and most fruitful weekends of my life.
Following the seminar, I felt completely invigorated. I had just made tons of friends across the state, including some who I still stay in touch with today, and had all sorts of ideas how I could bring the culture of HOBY back to my school. Luckily for me, I even had the additional opportunity to attend the HOBY World Leaders Conference (WLC) in Chicago that same summer. Similar to Iowa HOBY, HOBY WLC brings youth leaders together from around the world in a week-long celebration of enthusiasm and ideas. Together, these two seminars really set the course for the rest of my high school and college experience.
Above all, HOBY instilled in me a sense of empowerment and solidarity. As I continued to grow as a student and a leader, I consistently felt like I had the confidence and support to overcome obstacles and build new opportunities for myself and those around me. Following my HOBY experience, I took on new leadership roles in student government and multiple sports teams. In addition, I helped teachers and students at my school get new clubs off the ground, and I found ways to help existing clubs expand their reach and grow. Throughout high school, I also remained very active in HOBY’s alumni programs, so every summer I returned to the seminar as a member of the volunteer staff to learn from my peers and the younger ambassadors.
A lot of the momentum that HOBY helped me create continued into college. I felt incredibly excited to meet people from across the world and to see the ideas that they brought with them. Although I certainly experienced the doubts and lack of self-confidence common to many new college students, before long, I found myself creating my own place within campus. I made tons of friends, I studied abroad in New Zealand, and I discovered a passion for community engagement. As a member of student government, I lead campus improvement initiatives, and as a manager of student employees on the admissions staff, I helped organized campus visits for thousands of prospective students. Of course, I didn’t accomplish any of these feats on my own. All along I had amazing support networks, including those going back to my original HOBY experience.
Honestly, HOBY will always be a part of me. Nowadays, I teach English to high school students in Bulgaria, and the HOBY spirit still shines through me. More than a teacher, I see myself as a mentor. In each of my students is a spark – the same spark that was inside of me. If I can reach any of my students in the way that HOBY reached out to me, then I will know I will have left my community in a better place.
