Clay Club president molds her own future

Mt. Hood’s Clay Club president, Amber Meyer, finds time to maintain straight As while juggling two jobs, work-study, 16 credits, and six children – on top of being a member of Rho Theta and Trio.

Meyer first went to cosmetology school at the age of 17 at the Beau Monde College of Hair Design in Portland a year after having her first child, but soon ended up working dead-end jobs.

“By the time I had my third child, I didn’t want to work,” she said. “My husband was, luckily, working just enough to pay all of the bills so I decided to stay home. All of my (salary) was paying for daycare – there was no point of me working.”

After her husband got injured on the job, he and Meyer agreed it was time for him to pursue a career change. “I was like, ‘Okay, we’ll sacrifice, you go to school, get a career change,’ ” she said.

It was as she worked with her husband to fill out financial aid forms that she realized she qualified for a grant-funded education at Mt. Hood, she said.

While he was attending Mt. Hood to seek his associate’s degree, she was spending that time thinking about what degree she herself would pursue. She settled on becoming a business major. “I was thinking ‘What can I do?’ What degree can I get that would be a well-rounded degree so that whatever I chose in the future, it would carry with me?” she said.

“I admittedly do not like working for other people. I don’t think anybody does. I ultimately want to run my own business, so I was, like, that’s the perfect degree right there.”

When Meyer entered MHCC, she went through the Transitions program and took a ceramics class to fulfill her humanities requirements. “I was looking at all of the art classes and I was like ‘Hmm, I can’t draw, I can’t paint’ – sculpture seemed intimidating.”

She decided to go with ceramics because she had taken a pottery class in high school and was familiar with it. She took the class her first term at Mt. Hood, and picked up a work-study position as well.

Meyer also joined the Ceramics Club (now the MHCC Clay Club) during her first term and got involved gradually while “assisting last year’s president with everything she was doing, with the intention of taking over for this year,” she said.

She hopes her positivity about the club is noticed by others “and they want to join, too, because they see that it can be fun,” she said.

At home, Meyer’s children have taken on clay work as well. As a work-study student, she gets to take clay that’s left over from Mt. Hood classes and gives it to her kids for their own personal projects, she said. She sometimes glazes their work, using the extra kiln space at MHCC.

“Since they’re almost always little projects, they squeeze into void space between all the other stuff that’s not taking away from any of the students.” She said her children “get excited – they don’t make that many pieces that make it all the way through the process.”

Meyer hopes to attend a four-year university in Portland to finish her business degree, with an eye on business management. She is unsure of where, exactly, but has been accepted to almost all of the schools she applied to, she said.

With her busy schedule as a mom and full-time student, Meyer still manages to find time for herself.

Once she finally tucks her kids into bed, she likes to unwind. “I probably stay up til midnight. From 10 to whenever, I watch a TV show to relax, or I read a book, or if I didn’t manage to get my homework done, I do my homework,” she said.