I grew up in an almost aggressively STEM biased town, a average sized midwestern city called Rochester in southeast Minnesota. STEM and Small Town, MN… hmm. Though it seems like an unlikely combination, Rochester is the home of the Mayo Clinic, a top-tier medical institution with a handful of major campuses around the US. Just a bit more background about home: it feels like almost everyone has a family member that works at the Clinic or IBM. For most of my life, I lived across the street from the emergency room (that turned out to be rather convenient when I broke my nose falling out of bed), and the sounds of the Mayo helicopter overhead is just ambient noise.
As a result of this, I felt that for the longest time I wanted to be a doctor. For a while, I wanted to be a pediatrician so that I could work with kids, possibly because I remember my little sister being in the hospital a few times. After a heath careers camp, I was sure I wanted to be a nurse anesthetist. This stem fixation lasted a while, likely through seventh grade. After that, maybe because my eighth grade science class wasn’t may favorite, I switched courses.
My next fixation was journalism. Not just journalism, but studying journalism at Mizzou (University of Missouri), a school well known for its media studies programs. I had done extensive research about the school’s admissions, the program, and student life. This shift came after Journalism Camp in Minneapolis, MN. There, I made a short film about the Minnesota education system with three other students.
But this wasn’t right either. After a while, I hit a period of uncertainty where I didn’t have any idea what I wanted. My ACT score report reaffirmed this, as I took the Interest Inventory piece that comes before the exam. It was indeed true that I did not have a “clear preference for working with people, ideas, data, or things.”
It was scary not being sure of what I wanted to do, especially since my peers seemed so sure that they would be pediatric oncologists or whatever else (What is a pediatric oncologist? I still don’t know).
After a bit of self-discovery, I realized that I really enjoyed my history and language classes. I knew I enjoyed talking and interacting with people, so diplomacy, political science, or international relations. This path lead me through the rest of my high school career.
Eventually, the time of year came where I had decided to go to Scripps. I cried with joy to realize that I was able to go, but I was also a liitle scared to be going into the “real world,” where I would need to start knowing where I wanted to go in life.
Over the summer, I began thinking about my intended path, and looked at what classes I wanted to take year one. Korean, Spanish, Core, Writing 50. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t the international relations piece I was interested as much as I liked the languages.
I knew Scripps had a foreign language major, but I wasn’t sure if it would be what I wanted. With a nervous heart, I clicked on the program on the majors list to see if the foreign languages major was what I hoped it was.
I was so glad that I had looked. It was all that I had dreamed what it would be, if not more.
Flash forward to now: week nine of my first semester in college. I’m taking the classes I had hoped, plus a ballroom dancing course. I plan on declaring my Foreign Languages: Two-Language Cultural Study of Spanish and Korean this week.
This definitely wasn’t a streamlined or organized process, but through all of this exploration I’ve made it to a place where I think I’ll stay for a long time.
