Throughout my life, I have made it my goal to be a consistent person and, for the most part, I'd say that I've achieved that goal. Many of my thoughts and opinions in life have remained constant, albeit most of them have deepened with maturity, and my personality traits have remained constant. As an adult, I still read with the same voracity that I had when I was in elementary school, I still see the world with the same wonder and awe, I still doodle the living daylights out of any sheet of paper that is suitable for drawing on, I love everybody, and once I love you, to put it frankly, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. (As one of my home church members put it when I was 7, "forgiveness is just in [my] bones")
However, there is one part of my life I've been very wishy-washy on: what I want to do with my life. When I was small, I went through the "obligatory-veterinarian-phase,"and was often told that I should teach, although I decided I would never want to do that. I eventually settled on art when people discovered I was decent at rendering objects (and thus encouraged me to do it) and I stuck with that until high school. Throughout high school, I studied art alongside my traditional classes like AP math and Physics. During my junior year of high school, a group of faculty from my local trade school visited my pre-calculus class to see about interest in a pre-engineering course. I'd enjoyed my math classes, and also my physics class, so I signed up. The next year (my senior year), I was in the class, and preparing for a competition in a major, worldwide robotics tournament. Doing well enough in that competition made me change from wanting to study art, to wanting to study engineering.
I thought that engineering offered me almost everything that I wanted to do. I admit that I did struggle through my classes sometimes, but I made it through. I kept telling myself that eventually I would find a job that would let me work on planes (I've had a long standing love of aircraft because dad was a pilot), and that I could channel my creativity (something I loved) into engineering (something else I loved).
But it's not that easy now. I've discovered that I absolutely adore the BRIDGE office at my alma mater. (Small aside - for those who don't know, BRIDGE is a program for students that want to go to college but have an ACT score (or equivalent SAT score) of 18 or below.) I've worked one-on-one with several students that nobody, except the BRIDGE program, had any faith in. I've watched them glare at me when I take away their calculators, only to watch them ace their math finals at the end of the semester. I've seen some students write papers with so many comma splices and nonexistent words that you'd think an elementary student wrote the paper only to turn into some of the most eloquent and well-written students on campus. I've seen them go from mimicking the lack of faith others displayed for them to deciding to take up the reins and gallop through their studies.
In short, I've discovered that I want to teach. Don't get me wrong - I'd still love to get an engineering position at Tinker AFB, but now, instead of wanting to have a glittering career there until I retire and travel the world, I want to have a glittering career so that I can come back to a university and teach. And then travel the world later. (And to any OC faculty reading this - I could be your first female engineering professor... sounds pretty awesome right? Eh?)
