Thursday, October 4, 2012

What is my purpose?






What are your plans after high school? What field do you want to study? Thinking about playing sports in college? These are a small portion of the regularly asked questions that I receive. Just yesterday I was interviewed for channel 97.3's player profile for the pregame show. I told him the usual thing a somewhat gifted Nebraska student might say. "I plan on going to either UNL or UNK and studying Engineering or the Medical Sciences." For others it might be Agro-Business, or Horticulture, possibly Accounting and Finance. Instead of UNK and UNL it might be Iowa, Iowa State, UNO or maybe (if you're really talented)something Ivy-Leagueish. It's a difficult thing to really think about it. I'm so used to the high school life and I should be, I've been doing it for four years now. I could think back to the time when I was just getting into elementary school, and I thought "Wow, I'm finally a first grader." I can recall doing something very similar as I entered the middle school and when high school finally came around, I thought I was a real hot shot. College will be like nothing that I have experienced so far. And I think I just might like that.

It's always been at the very back of my mind. Waiting, itching, and busting for it's time to make itself prevalent my life. Pretty soon I'm gonna have to go into scholarship mode. Filling out form after form, and turning 10:30 nights into 12:30 skids. For me, it's still a pretty unsure thing on whether or not I've narrowed my choices down to UNL or UNK just yet. I take the ACT in October and the results of that will probably have a big impact on the school I decide to attend. Actually, that's not even the biggest determining factor on my school choice. The largest, most monument, most enormously huge decision that I still have to make is whether or not I want to be a college athlete. From multiple sources, the common impression that I get is college athletics is similar to a fulltime job. You eat, breath, and sleep the sport you play, and I don't know if I want to make that kind of commitment to one thing in college. I mean, it's college! I should  be out discovering new things, people, and ideas. I should be broadening the scope of my knowledge and taking in the feel of a big city as it surges with life and modernity.

The big city life experienced there could also be something that influences the decisions of my major and of the career path that I take after undergraduate school. I love this small town and all the aspects that make it  uniquely Aurora, but what if I come to love the city even more? What if the rush of people, the tempo of daily proceedings, and the ability to make connections with important, influential people is something that I just can't pass up so easily? I hate to say it, but it's always a possibility. My purpose will change with the city, or rural life that I choose. It's like a frayed rope, the single channel that I find myself on right now is my family, my high school, and my daily life here. The end of this rope contains a thousand single fibers, or pathways that lead me to another life. I'm reaching ever closer to this frayed section and with that comes a lot of choices that I must make. A couple of these choices will contain the type of major that I choose to study in college.

It's an amazing thing to consider. You will become an expert in one field of knowledge that will help propel you towards a career, earning money, and if you're passionate, making a difference in the world. I wish someone could just show me a brochure. This brochure would include a map of the place that I will live in. It will contain a description of exactly what I do and how I do it. Simply put, it will be a guide to my life, and how I got to where I am and who the people are who I affect with my work. I've always been interested in Aerospace Engineering and the concept of flight. How do they get a 50 ton airplane soaring 30,000 feet above the earth with 100 comfortably seated people is just amazing to me. I used to watch this show on the history channel called "Ancient Aliens." It was about this theory that extraterrestrials came to the Earth many thousands of years ago and helped establish human society and had a part in shaping human history as we know it. Now, I'm not saying that this hoccus-poccus idea should be taken for truth, it's just that in some of the episodes they pointed out that in ancient texts such as the Indian Mahabhararta and the Ramayana epic poems they describe the extraterrestrial's machines and crafts in such great detail that it simply astounded me. I wanted to go out and take those ideas that we could create spaceships and "UFOs" and fly off to distant planets.

As for the medical sciences, my motivation comes from my friend Jacob, who passed away because of cancer. I know this isn't the only story of a young person losing their promising life to this disease. There has to be a cure out there, and I want to be a part of something that finds the solution to such a widespread problem. I might want to invest my talents and abilities in the field of cancer study and biomedical engineering. Or maybe something will pop up in college that is completely and utterly unexpected. Maybe I'll turn out to be a farmer. Who know? I certainly don't.








1 comment:

  1. Alex,

    I hope you do find a cure for cancer. My great nephew was confirmed for a new study (because he is now stage 4 cancer with cancer in his lungs and liver) and I hope that these new drugs will stop the cancer. But here's what I love best in this posting:

    It's like a frayed rope, the single channel that I find myself on right now is my family, my high school, and my daily life here. The end of this rope contains a thousand single fibers, or pathways that lead me to another life. I'm reaching ever closer to this frayed section and with that comes a lot of choices that I must make.

    That is just great writing!

    Dr. English

    ReplyDelete