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Glamour recognizes cadet’s achievements

Wearing a jumpsuit with a parachute slung over her shoulder, Air Force Academy Cadet 1st Class Lindsey Robinson will be featured in the September issue of Glamour magazine.

Editors from the popular women’s fashion magazine didn’t select her simply to model the jumpsuit, though. She was chosen as one of the magazine’s top 10 college women for her skills in the classroom and in the air.

A member of the academy parachute team, Wings of Blue, Robinson has jumped out of a perfectly good airplane 321 times since she completed the academy’s free-fall program her first year.

“It was pretty unexpected for me. I’m not used to all this attention,” said the electrical engineering major, who admitted she had never before picked Glamour off the magazine stand.

Robinson will join nine other women, including a track and field star, an acclaimed pianist and a cancer research scientist, on the list the magazine has published for the past 51 years.

After she graduates, Robinson will serve as a communications engineer and hopes to get stationed at a combat communications squadron “because it’s more hands-on” and “it would give me an opportunity to deploy,” she said.

Academy spokesman John Van Winkle said that when the magazine came to him for candidates and he asked the cadet wing for suggestions, Robinson’s name was the one that kept coming up. Outside of skydiving, she helped start the academy’s Engineers Without Borders chapter and serves as the director of operations for Cadet Squadron 12.

“If you ask her, though, she’ll say any one woman from the academy deserves it just as much as her,” he said.

This fall, Robinson is looking forward to performing with Wings of Blue at academy football games and air shows, including one in her home state of Ohio, where she was inspired to join the Air Force as a research assistant at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base the summer before her senior year of high school.

“Working with the officers there was amazing, and I got to talk to some of academy grads who told me I should look into trying it out,” she said.