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One of the main reasons that Jimmy Marcotte decided to enroll at the University of Kentucky was horses.
Marcotte, who is from Vermont, had ridden horses and participated in equine events since he was a child, and he wanted to go to a university where he could continue.
"It was really the horses that kind of tied the knot and brought me down here, for sure," said Marcotte, 23, who graduated magna cum laude from UK on Sunday with a degree in architecture and as salutatorian of his class.
And what a ride he's had since coming to Lexington.
Just three weeks into his first semester, Marcotte was selected as a stunt rider for the movie Seabiscuit, part of which was filmed in Central Kentucky.
The movie crew wanted someone about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, weighing less than 120 pounds and over 18 years old, who could ride and jump. Marcotte fit the bill.
"I didn't even have to audition," he said. "They trusted I could do all of the things I told them."
Marcotte, representing a young Red Pollard, appears on horseback in several scenes of the 2003 movie. The horse he rode was a Grand Prix show jumper more than 17 hands high.
"It's probably the biggest horse I ever sat on, for sure," he said.
Marcotte was a member of UK's dressage and equestrian teams, and received an academic and athletic achievement award from the United States Dressage Federation. He was president of the dressage team.
"My family's owned horses my whole life," he said. He and his two sisters grew up competing in horse shows.
But horses aren't Marcotte's whole life. There's also architecture, his major at UK, and music and French, his minors.
"I was a saxophone major when I started here," he said. He's been playing that instrument since he was 10, and he was a member of high school concert and jazz bands that won awards at the North American Music Festival.
He learned French during his years in Vermont schools and "just kept going with it and ended up with a minor" from UK. This past academic year he was president of the UK chapter of Tau Sigma Delta, the architecture and allied arts honor society.
Sometimes Marcotte, a recipient of a prestigious UK Gaines Fellowship, has combined some of his interests in academic projects.
His thesis for the fellowship was Spatial Melodies: Creating Architectural Space Through Music. His jury project was a program design for an equine center at UK.
Marcotte is fascinated with mixing music and architecture, with "using sound to alter the perception of space," he said. He hopes to design concert halls and equestrian facilities in the future.
At some point he'd like to live in a French-speaking country, he said.
For now, he's going home to Vermont to spend some time with his family and 24-year-old Champ, a horse he rode in competitions for several years.
Marcotte will be coming back to Kentucky to visit.
"I'd like to go to the Kentucky Derby," he said.
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