Monday, February 20, 2006

re-thinking many things

I've gotten into a bad habit of running into dilemmas lately. The big one right now: to teach, or not to teach? I keep telling people this, but the more I go through my undergraduate career, the more I realize that an undergrad major really doesn't seem to matter too much (unless you are going into a very specific field). I don't see myself getting as excited about teaching as I used to. Don't get me wrong - I still love kids - but I just don't see teaching as being, for me, the best medium of relating to them - I don't think I'm creative enough.

As a history major/spanish minor, I have a pretty wide (or narrow, depending on how you look at it) field of options. I won't, for example, be able to be an engineer with this kind a major. But I don't want to be an engineer. I might, however, be able to take on a more people-oriented position (not that engineers aren't people-oriented; I know plenty who are, and much of what they do centers around the needs of people - my hat goes off to you engineers). I'm still really interested in translational work - being able to translate languages always gets me pretty excited (though at this point spanish and english are the only two that I really have under my belt).

In some ways I feel like I could really choose to "panic" at this point, but I'm not. In fact, instead, I have this refreshing feeling of freedom in some ways. I think I had narrowed my focus down so much to teaching that I forgot how many other options I had, and I panicked slightly when I realized it might not be for me. It is a little nerve-wracking to think that I might not know exactly what I'll be doing when I graduate (teaching or not - still working it out), but I know that God has plans that He knows thoroughly - I think I need to ask Him about those plans a little more. Yay for hope!