In the eighth grade, Bobbi Kingery went through a voice change and realized she had a talent for singing.

“I went from a bad soprano in the 7th grade to a good alto in the 8th grade,” she said. It was then that her love for singing and music helped her realize it was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

She was born in Springfield to parents in the U.S. Air Force and moved to Mattoon when she was 10 years old. She graduated from Mattoon High School in 1982 and her aspirations to become a vocal performer drew her to Eastern.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in vocal performance, she took off for Nashville, Tenn. and worked as a secretary and section leader soloist in a church choir.

After three years in Nashville, Bobbi’s father became very ill. She wanted to move back to Illinois to be with her father, and she figured the best way to do that was to begin graduate school.

So she moved back to Mattoon to help take care of her father and attended classes at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

She finished all of the coursework for her master’s degree in vocal performance and only needed to perform a recital to obtain her degree. At the same time, her father’s health was deteriorating and she made the decision to quit school without completing her recital.

“I kept hearing all of the Ph.D. students talk about how difficult their job search was going,” she said. “I realized that vocal performance wouldn’t allow consistent income and the competition for jobs was high.”

For the next six months, she lived at home, helped take care of her father and worked odd jobs.

After his death, she decided that she would return to graduate school ,but her direction this time was in a completely different field.

She began her studies at Eastern in guidance counseling.

“I just kept asking myself, `What am I good at?'” she said. “I was always solving my friends’ problems, and I was really good at helping people realize their strengths.

It was just something I was good at naturally, and I also knew it would be a stable environment financially.”

Kingery worked as a graduate assistant in the Career Services Office at Eastern for two years and fell in love with the environment.

“I realized how much fun it is to work with students at this age,” she said. “I liked helping them figure out what it was they wanted to do.”

She eventually obtained a master’s of science and education degree with an emphasis on college student personnel and now works in Eastern’s Career Services Office as a career advisor with focus in the College of Arts and Humanities and the College of Science.

She said she likes doing the kind of work she does because she wants her advisees to get headed in the right direction. There is always one particular reason why a student enters a field. If it’s English, it’s probably because the student loves to write or read, Kingery said.

Many students have one particular job they want to do and remain focused on that one particular job.

“What I like to show students is that we can go down this route, but we’ll still be heading in the right direction,” she said.

She said she tries to help students look at what jobs they’ve worked or what things they’ve done to help them pick out the job’s good qualities. Kingery looked at her good qualities when she made her career switch.

“I used music as a way to communicate and that’s exactly what counseling is,” she said. “That’s why it was a logical choice for me.”

Kingery said she would like to get to students when they are freshmen and sophomores to help them understand what it is they enjoy or what it is they’re good at instead of what people are telling them they need to do.

“Students, too many times, don’t believe in themselves,” she said. “I’ve never found a student that didn’t have some really interesting qualities.

“We can use those interesting qualities to see where they would fit. We can also figure out what extracurricular activities they would most enjoy and benefit from,” Kingery said.

Despite her career switch, Kingery has still not lost her love for music. In fact, she is beginning voice lessons again this semester.

“That’s the neat thing about music,” she said. “You just keep learning.”

Currently she is involved in the women’s chorus on campus and does various soloist work in area churches in Mattoon.

“You always have to have something fun,” she said. “You always have to have an outlet you enjoy.”

She said she doesn’t regret her decision to leave music behind as a professional career because she is still involved in music.

It’s her outlet for fun, she said.

In the future, Kingery would like to return to graduate school and study higher education.

“I think teaching grad classes would be fun, or working in upper administration as a V.P. or above,” she said.

She loves learning new things so much that she even tries to take a weekend class each semester here at Eastern.

“It’s just learning for the sake of learning,” Kingery said.

However, in the very near future, she will be learning about the ways of motherhood. She’s expecting her first child in April.