All Stories

I want to tell young girls: Whatever you want to put your mind to, you can achieve it. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. As a female police officer, I’m going to have to work 20 times as hard as any man.

In a world of influencers and models, you look at these people and you think, “I want to look like that.” But that’s not how it is with the 500 Festival Princess Program.

When I was in middle school choir, I was assigned to be a helper and mentor to a student with Down syndrome. I ended up getting really close with his family. I did a lot of work with the Special Olympics in high school, too.

I went to the Indy 500 when I was younger, but I didn’t know I was hearing the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band the whole time until I was able to be a part of it in college as a Golduster.

At the age of 11, Bill Pappas saved enough money to attend his first-ever Indianapolis 500. Since then, he has turned his dreams into a reality, along the way working with some of the biggest names in racing — Juan Pablo Montoya, Emerson Fittipaldi and A.J. Foyt.

Like all good ideas, Junobie was created out of necessity. As a traveling working mother of two, Nickey Ramsey became frustrated with the few options available at the time to store her breastmilk — or, as she calls it, “liquid gold” — while on-the-go.

Whatever your idea of a typical classroom experience looks like, it’s certainly not The Data Mine. This unique living-learning community offers boundary-breaking learning for students from all backgrounds and gives students the chance to work on real-world projects with major corporations like Beck’s Hybrids, Cummins and Microsoft.

It’s the coolest moment when we turn the corner of the Indy 500 track, and you see all of the people in the stands lined up, and you are the first thing they’re all looking at.

The 500 Festival Princess Program started out as a pageant, but there’s so much more to what it means to be a leader and a princess. I fell in love with community service my freshman year building an assistive fishing device for a 7-year-old boy.

At the Indy 500, a lot of the drum major’s role is the showmanship of it all — wearing the big, tall bear hats, leading the band through the parades, but there is also the logistics.

Being from a small town, there’s not a whole lot of diversity. There wasn’t anybody that looked like me. I got pointed out a lot, and I just knew from a very early age I was not the same as everybody else.