Discovering Me

In my college experience the things that I loved to do were things that I considered hobbies and a waste of time: The college TV station, The college paper, working in student senate to draft the new constitution, going to the poetry shows, writing papers for my PoliSci class, coming up with a development plan for a fake developing country . . .etc.

Yes, I thought that writing those papers and making that development plan was just busy work that the teachers gave us. After all, for me, it took almost no effort to do and I enjoyed it, that couldn't possibly be a legitimate lucrative line of work. 

In short, I did not see my skills as skills, I thought everyone should be able to do what I do because it wasn't hard. I wanted a challenge and thought forcing myself to do science was the prestigious and more lucrative path. My options seemed limited in career paths that would make me a lot of money in the shortest amount of time. It was Math, Science, Medical, Business. I couldn't do math and science made me feel inadequate when compared to other students. Medicine required studying lots of science and being around insufferable, self-important science types. I had to reject business as a Christian (so I thought at the time). After all business was for greedy, power hungry people who lacked compassion and wanted to be a part of "the machine" instead of raging against it. I didn't know what to do. So I decided just to graduate. I changed my BioMed major to a Bio Minor with a Major in International Studies. I choose the major because the classes seemed fun and I could still graduate on time.

So then I made the mistake of going on the History/PoliSci Departmental trip to visit a local law school. I had no idea what law school was or what lawyers did. In theory I understood all, everything is just a Google search away, but the reality of it was far from my knowing. When we went on the trip and we experienced a mock class, I had fun. I had the epiphany. I would be a lawyer, I would beast in class, read all the cases and make tons of money. I was wrong. 

At the end of undergraduate, I was burnt out even though I had hope for a post-grad future with my epiphany on the whole lawyer thing. My intentions were to wait a year, get some life experience and then go on to greatness. I guess my family didn't trust me. But in hindsight, I should have just done what I wanted, it would have been cheaper.