I was a working student for two BNT eventers.
One - your college education is far more important. Focus on that. The prime time to be a WS is in HS during the summer, or after you graduate college. Do not try to juggle academics and working student responsibilities. It Will Not Work.
Trust me - you do not want to be like myself and other COTHers that made the mistake of focusing on our equestrian education over our academic one – only to find this is NOT the business to make money in, and have to go back to college in their late 20s/early 30s/40s just to make enough money to afford to live. It’s not pleasant.
I learned a lot of ‘hands-on’ things as a WS - some of it useful, some of it useless. I became a much better rider, and was given opportunities to ride horses far beyond my caliber as a teen (AKA, I was used to TBs retrained by me… nothing like sitting on a horse trained by an Olympian rider!)… but that being said… so much of it is stuff you can also learn by getting your hands on every book source, reading material you can… I learned more about horse-care on COTH than I did with both of my WS stints – and both of my BNTs were very respected/educated horsemen.
One of the things I learned that you could not learn in books though, is developing an eye for diamonds in the rough and true sport prospects - I went to the track several times with one BNT and looked at hundreds of TBs… so much of my ‘type’ and eye can be accredited to her. She has brought several OTTBs to the 4* level; granted, a bulk of them were in the Long Format days.
So… it was worth it in a sense that it really developed my eye for horseflesh - I learned so much about the sport, about other barns, about what Real Conditioning work is (thanks Sally), it hammered down my skill in the barn (chore efficiency, client/worker management, etc), and it propelled my riding tool box tremendously… but I still didn’t get a degree for this education, and it is not an education that can make me any real type of money.
