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!

2 comments:

Hattie said...

Well, I'm glad we've established that you don't want to be an engineer because, you know, lately I've been worried that you might want to be an engineer.

Holly said...

Heh. Yeah, don't panic. You have no need to panic yet. I mean, I'm 7 weeks from graduation and I still don't know what I want to do, and am I panicking? Psh.

::runs screaming down hallway::

(Hi! btw :))