Meet Rachel Elyse Harris!

Meet Rachel Elyse Harris. When she is sixty-nine years old she will be running her own ranch and breeding business in Montana. She will also own her own veterinarian office that will be located on her ranch. As Rachel sees patients everyday in the office and runs her ranch, she will be thinking about retirement. Rachel would like to enjoy her ranch and be able to teach all of her grandchildren new life lessons and about “the good ole days!”
When Rachel finds the guy she wants to spend her life with in Montana, “he would be a country boy that likes to be outside and can take time to just relax, but also knows how to work hard. He would like to sit down by the river and watch the fire and listen to the crickets chirp, but would also take me out to dinner and have date nights spontaneously! He has to have a since of humor and be able to take a joke but know when it is time to be serious! He would be able to respect decisions I make and support me on them. He would love to be around family and want to have one of his own and in some way want to leave his mark on the world, and he would have to be a Christian and working on having a closer relationship with God. He needs to be cute too!”
Rachel bases her ideal husband on her close relationship with her dad Jeff. As Rachel says, “I have a lot of the same values as my dad and I seem to talk like him a lot! We say a lot of the same things and our mind set on the world and people are pretty close.” In Rachel’s eyes her dad is the best in the world. Rachel is also very close with her mom Teresa and stepdad Kevin. Also a very important person in Rachel’s life is her brother Clif who lives in Colorado. According to her best friend Alyssa, “Rachel has gone through her parent's divorce, which has made her more understanding, independent, and open. She has a great relationship with her mom, dad, and step-dad. I also think that the divorce made Rachel and her brother depend on each other more, so they have an awesome relationship as well.” Rachel has three surviving grandparents who she says “are hilarious, especially my granddad. He will just say whatever is on his mind and doesn’t care what people think.” She has a whole bunch of cousins but two of her younger cousins live near her. She counts them as her little sisters and spends a lot of time with them. She often picks the two of them up in her white X-Terra and takes them for the day to hang out.
Rachel has a lot of friends from home that have come to Virginia Tech. Her best friend Alyssa, however, attends college at James Madison University. Alyssa and Rachel know how to have a good time and call each other “b”. When asked about her friends, Rachel said, “all of my friends from back home are always together when we aren’t in school. We go hiking and go to the river and swim. We all have very different personalities but I think that is what makes us get along so well. We all really respect each other and look out for each other. It is more like a family and the guys are really protective of all the girls. They definitely bring out the best in me but at times they have seen me at my worst.” Also according to Alyssa, “She knows where she's from and is proud of it. Rach loves country music, country boys, and country back roads. She finds joy in the little things and loves the simple life. She's smart and motivated. Back home, she's known to be there for people when they need her. She was voted "most likely to lend a dollar" senior year. She's country.”
Rachel’s greatest accomplishment is, “when I was in the fourth grade, the teacher told me I was at the bottom of my class in reading, so I had to get help, and I ended up graduating in the top 7% of my class with honors, some of those in English.”
As a sophomore in college, Rachel has not changed a lot since her senior year in high school. She has, however, come to value her hometown a lot more since she has been away at college. She no longer takes the little things in life that she did when she was at home for granted; for instance, playing with her dog or just going down to the river for the day.
In high school, and since she was four or five, she rides horses and spends a lot of time at the barn. She also attended a lot of sporting events but never played because she is so accident prone. She broke her ankle for the second time while playing basketball. She also spent a lot of time at her friend’s homes who had barns. She also enjoys going hunting with her dad and brother. For the last five years she has gone into the woods at the crack of dawn waiting for deer to come into sight. She has kept most of the same hobbies since high school but has acquired two new hobbies in college. They are keeping her grades up and learning to study.
Her best friend Alyssa summed up Rachel in a perfect way, “when Rachel is around friends, she is happy. She truly loves her friends and finds joy in just being around people she appreciates. She is relaxed, comfortable, and mellow most of the time. She doesn't get worked up or caught up in the details too often; she goes with the flow and seems to know everything will work out. When she is hyper, she's loud (but not in an obnoxious way), smiling, and can usually be found singing along to a country song.”