Last summer, Zion Kidd toured Israel and Palestine with fellow Emory University students. The following month, he attended the inaugural Accenture Student-Athlete Leadership Conference hosted in Atlanta, which eventually led to an internship with Accenture this summer.
Fast forward to this summer. “I look at my Snapchat memories form last summer and I was halfway across the world in Jerusalem. Here I am now in my apartment in Georgia alone on my laptop,” he laughed. “I expected to be working my internship in D.C., but I have either been in Atlanta or in my small hometown in Maryland. It is not what I envisioned my summer being.”
The track student-athlete is becoming accustomed to things not going as planned. “I was really happy with the way the indoor season ended. I was energized and healthy for the spring season,” Kidd recalled. “It was taken away and that was super heartbreaking. Competing is the most fun. I enjoy practice, but actually getting on the starting line is my favorite. Not being able to do that in the spring was annoying, frustrating, disappointing, and depressing.”
Emory and Applying for the Trip
“A lot of people I grew up were going to University of Maryland, but I didn’t want that huge school experience,” explained Kidd, who also didn’t think he wanted to be in the South. “When I visited Emory, I fell in love with the campus, particularly the buildings. It seemed like one of those movie campuses. Running track was not the most important part, but was a great added bonus. I was drawn to it for being a great academic school.”
According to Hillel’s Guide to Jewish Life at Colleges and Universities, Emory ranked 34th in the U.S. by percentage of Jewish students in the total undergraduate student population. “I didn’t know about Judaism apart from the old testament as part of my Christian faith, but one of my majors is religion,” he described. “One of my good friends suggested I apply as a student leader for the annual summer trip to Israel.”
Several of his friends are Jewish and were able to go on the trip by Birthright Israel, while he was accepted through the application process. “There were three of four friends I was close to on the trip, but I was surprised how many people on a small campus I did not know or had not met,” Kidd stated. The trip costs were almost fully funded with the students only responsible for lunch each day and for any shopping they wanted to do.
An Inauspicious Start in Israel
Kidd anticipated the flight to be the same length as a trip to Europe. “I totally misjudged how far it was. The flight was insanely long and I wasn’t mentally prepared for it,” he admitted. “When we finally arrived in Tel Aviv, I felt like a kid going to Disneyland. I was the first in line at customs and with the name Zion (a name that refers to Israel as the homeland), I knew they would love me.”
That turned out to be another miscalculation. “I handed them my passport and they said my first and middle names, Zion Rashad. Then the agent said something in Hebrew, stared at me, and said, ‘Give me a moment.’ I asked for my passport back. She refused and told me to go sit in this little room.”
Kidd sat calmly in the room at first. “One woman was on the phone and I heard her say, ‘We have been sitting here for hours and somebody has to let us out of this prison.’ My flight-or-fight response kicked in and I started to freak out,” he recounted. “Then my friend Hassan came into the room and he calmed me down. Zion Rashad and Hassan. I saw where things went wrong.”
Eventually, he just left the room to try to explain that he and Hassan were on a school trip with Hillel from Emory. “I was asked a series of questions like where my mom and dad were from. Then they asked me where my father’s father was from. I never met him so I assumed he was from the same small town in Alabama that my parents were,” he narrated. “Finally, they let me go. That was my first 30 minutes in Israel.”
The Trip
The following day, the group headed to the Old City of Jerusalem to visit the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple Mount. “We went inside and it was all right there. We walked on the spot where Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac,” explained Kidd. “We hit all the hot spots of the Bible and I got to stand on top of Mount Zion (a hill in Jerusalem, located just outside the walls of the Old City)!”
The next day’s stop was in Bethlehem. “I thought it didn’t still exist as it was similar to how Byzantium and Constantinople are now called Istanbul. Yet there it was, a small rural town still named Bethlehem,” he explained. “I thought they would have a resort or something similar now. There was a church rather than an old inn where Jesus was born. We had to get in line to go into where the manger would have been (the town itself was destroyed and rebuilt at a higher elevation). It turned out to be an Eastern Orthodox holiday and their church was about to start service so we got rushed out. I literally peeked my head into the door, saw the spot where Jesus was born, and got pushed out of the way.”
The group listened to a Palestinian talk about his lived experience of Israel and occupation, then a Jewish man from New York give the Israeli perspective on settlements. “They were saying the complete opposite things,” Kidd revealed. “It was obvious how much these two groups of people absolutely hate each other.”
Kidd didn’t realize until later that being able to go into the city of Ramallah, their next stop, was highly unusual for non-Palestinians. Ramallah serves as the seat of government in Palestine (Israel and Palestine both claim Jerusalem as their capitol, but Palestine does not have authority there). “We had meetings with two liberation leaders who gave us a history lesson,” he recounted. “It was incredible to be able to see it from their perspective, rather than the Western media portrayal.”
One of the things that struck Kidd was how nonchalantly people in Israel and Palestine talked about things that he and others found to be very intense. ‘We went on a Jeep tour north to one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen. We went by mine fields with barbed wire fences and the tour guide said, ‘We don’t have maps so we can’t guarantee which parts are active. If your cow blows up, you get a new cow.’ He said it so casually,” he communicated. “We were on a mountain and saw a tank, which we assumed was inactive and part of an abandoned military site. We had an amazing view of Yemen and Syria out on the horizon. All of a sudden, we were told we had to leave. It turned out the tank was real and IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers were in it the whole time. The tank started moving and the gun barrel was rotating.”
The group spent part of the next day in a settlement in an Israeli town on the border of Gaza, where they met a woman who spoke to them about being a founding member of the town. “She lived in a bomb shelter with no windows and super thick walls and she showed us a pot she made from an old bomb. We assumed it was a long time ago, but she informed us it was from two weeks prior,” he narrated. “She told us stories of how kids used to play soccer in the fields and kites would land so they would go after them, but the ‘kites’ were actually bombs. We went to the wall that borders Gaza and Israel, where we were told we were safe because we were too close to the wall to be bombed, which meant hypothetically we could be bombed when we moved further from it. All I know is I wanted out of this border town!”
Kidd enjoyed stopping by a community of Druze, an ancient religion that originated in Egypt. “They had the best coffee ever. I met the chef who he made the food and he talked for a while. I didn’t understand one word he said, but as we were preparing to leave, he gave me a hug, picking me up with my feet dangling in the air. It was the best hug ever,” he laughed.
From there, they visited a commune of hippies. “They had all served in IDF, regretted it, and hated it. They were the first people in Israel we met who weren’t pro-Zionism,” he stated. “They were only a year or two older than most of us, but their lived experiences were far greater than ours. They had much bigger problems than we have. It was like looking in the mirror, but seeing a totally different reflection.”
Returning to Tel Aviv gave Kidd more of what he was expecting when he embarked on the trip. Tel Aviv was what I thought Israel was going to be, very European,” he explained. “While we were in other parts of Israel, they hosted Eurovision (the 64th Eurovision Song Contest was held at the Expo Tel Aviv, the International Convention Center). The national pride was insane to see. They got to host because the previous year’s champion (Netta Barzilai for her song “Toy,” inspired by the #MeToo campaign) was from there. I can’t overstate how huge the event was.”
What added to the excitement, and some would argue controversy about Tel Aviv hosting the event, was that Madonna performed two songs at Eurovision, including “Future” with Quavo. “It was incredible that they were in Israel the same time we were. Quavo was in the exact same spot at the Western Wall the day after I was,” Kidd related.
Accenture
The one constant between the two very different summers for Kidd was having opportunities through Accenture, a Fortune Global 500 information technology and services company based in Dublin, Ireland. Atlanta is one of 11 North American cities in which the company has a hub and hosted the student-athlete conference he attended in 2019.
“I met a lot of athletes from other schools, who I don’t often get to talk to, at the leadership conference. I met a lot of Division I athletes, including some from the Ivy League, and I met a great guy, Nick Krantz, who plays football at WashU,” he remarked. “It was great to be with people who had similar shared experiences.”
Kidd worked with fellow student-athletes in a Shark Tank-style case competition. “It was an insightful hands-on event that gave me the tools to leverage my unique experiences as a collegiate athlete in the workplace,” he said. “Using design thinking and incorporating some of the Accenture Digital Technology, my team pitched the winning idea to a panel of judges.”
At the end of the immersive two-day conference, all the participants found out they would be getting first round interviews for an internship for the following summer. “I worked hard to prepare, learning more about the company and case prepping and got an offer,” Kidd announced. “I was so excited to have an internship entering my senior year.”
The internship was due to start the first week this June. “I come from a small town and don’t go out a lot at school with classes and track so I was really excited to be an intern in an office, to experience the office dynamic and grab coffee with colleagues,” he described. “The whole idea I had in my head didn’t happen because of COVID.”
Kidd is still appreciative of the internship, albeit not in the expected office setting. “It was originally supposed to be a 10-week internship. It started two weeks late, but they added a week at the end so it ended up being nine weeks,” he explained. “I know a lot of people who got their internships shortened to one or two weeks, or cancelled all together. I am thankful for the nine weeks and for Accenture trying to give me as similar an experience as they could remotely.”
Senior Year and Beyond
Kidd will be in Atlanta for his senior year, rooming with two others in off-campus housing, but the campus and college experience will have a much different feel than in the past. “A lot of my friends won’t be there. My roommates will be about the only people I can see. A lot of people who were planning to live on campus won’t be there,” he mused. “A lot of my younger friends on track aren’t coming back. There are a lot of sophomores and juniors who won’t be there. There won’t be an opportunity to get to know the freshmen on campus.”
Beyond whatever graduation will look like in May 2021, Kidd hopes to secure a full-time position. “I really like consulting though I am open to whatever,” remarked Kidd, who would like to remain in Atlanta. “My sister lives here and it would be nice to see her more. Between my school and track, and her work, our schedules never seem to match up.”
Although the NCAA is granting eligibility waivers to those who lost their spring season in 2020, Kidd does not see that as a realistic option for him. “I can’t justify spending the money just to compete in sport. I am getting a great degree and education,” he expressed. “Maybe if I was a fall athlete, I could go back for one semester, but I would need to be there an entire year to compete in track in a fifth year.”
Working at Hollister through high school and fulfilling one of his dreams by working at H&M his first summer of college, Kidd found that learning retail from the bottom up was what got him interested in business. “If you know me, you know I like clothes. I like the idea of being able to go into a store and see something different every week,” he commented. “I learned in college and from research how bad fast fashion is for the environment. I want to find some way to make fast fashion a sustainable business model where customer service isn’t compromised, but we can do it while keeping the environment in mind. Global warming is a real danger, but I like clothes. I want to be part of the solution. I don’t know how yet, but I will.”