Jessica De Los Reyes pictured herself doing a lot of things after college.
Driving a 27-foot-long hot dog wasn’t one of them.
But the dietetics senior and 11 other soon-to-be college graduates have been selected as “hotdoggers,” each fulfilling a yearlong tour driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
“I’m so excited,” she said. “I’m going to take advantage of all the opportunities.”
Her brother, Josh De Los Reyes - a former hotdogger and labor and industrial relations graduate student - arranged for the famous frankfurter to surprise her outside the Union on Tuesday.
Jessica De Los Reyes said it will be difficult to spend a year on the road away from her family, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to travel.
“I haven’t started yet, but I think it will definitely be worth it,” she said. “I’m still taking it all in.”
De Los Reyes and her brother are the first siblings ever to have both been hotdoggers.
“My parents are so proud,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity - they’re happy for us.”
The Wienermobile, which has the capacity to hold 11,000 Wienerwhistle toys, is in mid-Michigan for an appearance at Lansing’s Delta Center Elementary School. The school’s students are finalists in a contest to sing the company’s advertising jingle.
There are six Wienermobiles, each with different license plates , such as “IWISHIWR” and “WNRMBLE,” that travel various regions of the country.
Each vehicle is equipped with six “relish-colored” seats, a global positioning navigational system, a 27-inch television and VCR, and two “doggie watch” exterior cameras offering forward and rear views of the vehicle.
“So we don’t scratch our buns,” hotdogger Marshawn Brown said.
The job is unique, Brown said. Wherever they go, people stop to talk, stare and even peek inside the hot dog.
“When you drive a hot dog around every day, it doesn’t get much stranger,” she said. “People will come and tell us their life story.”
And the 11-foot-tall vehicle turned heads on campus. People stopped to stare and leaned out of their cars to shout “I love wieners!” at the vehicle as it drove down Shaw Lane on Tuesday.
Meghann Tang stopped in Breslin Center’s parking lot for a quick photo opportunity with the fiberglass wiener after she saw it while driving.
“I almost ran off the road,” she said. “I didn’t think they were real, still.”
Hotdoggers train for two weeks at the company’s Hot Dog High facility in Madison, Wis., where they learn public relations skills, event planning and how to maneuver their buns through traffic.
The job is hard to get, said hotdogger Tracy Schampers.
Each year the company receives about 1,200 applications for only 12 spots, she said.
“We’ve received résumés in stale, old hot dog buns,” Schampers said. “You name it.”
