Four-Legged Freshman

Of all the thousands of students packing up to go to college this month, most have one thing they can't leave behind: the perfect pair of jeans, the iPod, the Bible, the fake ID.

For Kara Clissold, that one thing is her horse. When Hop Ashore was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College this spring, she sent in her deposit.

"He definitely knows," she said, reaching out and rubbing his chin. She walked back to the barn to get the last of his things, piling bridles over her shoulder. Her mom unscrewed the brass nameplate from the front of his stall, rubbed the dust off and held it for a moment, looking at it.

Like every other freshman, Clissold, 18, is a little nervous about leaving home. But she's more worried about Hop: Will he like the food there? Make new friends? Measure up?

During campus tours last year, her mother asked her if she could imagine living there. Clissold said, "If my horse could be happy here, I'm sure I could be happy."

And so with one large borrowed trailer, one new-to-them used pickup truck, one car, a bunch of hay and a zillion boxes, they set off Monday morning from their Bel Air, Md., home toward Interstate 95, the Capital Beltway, Lynchburg, Va., and their futures.

Clissold isn't the only student bringing a horse to freshman orientation. In a region known for its hunt country and racetracks, many schools have equestrian programs, and some allow about 15 students to bring their animals each year.

Not that Nancy Kreiter, Clissold's mother, knew that. As a biology professor at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, she advises students on their courses and graduate schools -- so she thought she would be a big help to her daughter when it came time to apply to colleges.

But Clissold never seemed very interested in the schools her mother suggested, places such as Vassar and Amherst and Swarthmore. "She balked at applying," Kreiter said.

Kreiter looked through a Mount Holyoke College brochure, trying to figure out why that school appealed and the others didn't. That's when she saw photos of horses, and it hit her: She was talking about academics. Her daughter was considering only schools with equestrian programs.

When her parents gathered photos for a graduation page this spring, they couldn't find any of Clissold without a horse. As a toddler, she played with hobby horses. She rode ponies at camp. She trained her dog to do jumps in the back yard, mucked out stalls at a nearby farm, took riding lessons, saved money.

When she first rode Hop Ashore, a 15-year-old chestnut thoroughbred with a white blaze on his nose, she didn't like him. He had been a racehorse, and maybe he missed the track; he was ornery, and he didn't know how to jump.