An old soul, plant lady and your resident caffeine addict, Lydia Ripley is the embodiment of sunlight. She is an elementary education major, a barista at the HICCUP and the Resident Assistant of Third Crawford, affectionately known as The Cove. When she is not off-campus doing her clinical hours in the classroom or working at the HICCUP, she can be found curled up with a good book next to her cat, Lucy.
Ripley was raised in Virginia Beach, VA, with her little sister, just a few miles from her close extended family.
“While growing up, my family would emphasize the importance of being together so we would always eat dinner at the table together,” she said. “My parents would always be back from work in time just for that.” She talked of the karate lessons she took as a kid with her father and sister as something that strengthened their bond.
Though growing up in a tight-knit family, Ripley said, “I didn’t know who I was as a person in middle and early high school.” At the time, she was attending a school with a law-based program. Ripley thought she wanted to be an attorney, so she took intro to law and criminal justice classes and took many field trips to courtrooms throughout her high school career.
All of this changed her junior year of high school. She said, “I went through some personal changes and figured out who I was as a person and realized that God was calling me to be an elementary school teacher.”
In retrospect, Ripley can trace her love of teaching all the way back to her childhood when she would play school with her little sister and be the teacher.
And so, after graduating high school, Ripley made her way to central Kentucky. After graduating from Asbury in 2023, Ripley plans to go back to Virginia to get her master’s in Education, so that she may teach in her own classroom for a very long time.
Her compassion for others is evident to everyone who interacts with her at the HICCUP while getting their 2 o’clock caffeine fix. Her heart for others is even more apparent to those living on The Cove and those closest to her.