This part of the website is supposed to have my story, my journey, how I got to where I am today. But if I’m being totally honest, I don’t really have that big passion for one thing that is driving me forwards. I don’t have huge dreams of becoming a surgeon or a therapist or a professor. There hasn’t been a big life-altering event that showed me the path to whatever it is that I’m supposed to do.

I used to think that I would be an engineer. In 8th grade, instead of choosing to rotate between all 4 specialty classes during the year, I selected full-year STEM. That basically means what it says; you forgo art and music and whatever the third class was in exchange for an entire year of STEM. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, building bottle rockets and styrofoam boats and a trebuchet. Our class even went on a trip to Temple University to participate in a SeaPerch event, where teams raced remote-controlled submersibles. Naturally, this urge to pursue STEM followed me into high school. I took engineering classes throughout all four years. I learned how to make orthographic and isometric drawings, studied basic CAD, built birdhouses, and so much more. We even made a few cornhole boards. I was fully on board. This is what I wanted to pursue.

In my senior year, I had two classes that really piqued my interest. First off was a digital design class, specifically oriented towards creating designs to print on t-shirts. We even got to use the presses and put our designs on the shirts themselves, and I remember a simple one I made of the reverse card from the game Uno. The second class was called STEM Guitar, and you guessed it, we built guitars. Now, we didn’t make these completely from scratch; we each got a kit with parts and wires, as well as pre-cut bodies and necks that we would modify and customize. My Dad used to play guitar all the time, and I inherited his old acoustic that my Mom bought him before he passed. I had always wanted to learn to play, but for whatever reason I never tried to pick it up. I had hoped that completing this guitar on my own would lead me down that path.

One day towards the end of the year, I was sitting in a diner with some of my friends during “Senior Skip Day.” This was, as I’m sure you’re able to gather, a sort of unofficial skip day, where seniors wouldn’t show up for classes. One at a time we all noticed an email from the school district. Because of the Covid-19 outbreak, schools would be closed for two weeks, to “flatten the curve.” We were all ecstatic. There couldn’t be a better moment than that; the three of us eating breakfast food at noon, getting ready for 14 straight days of unexpected time off. We had no idea what was actually coming.

The year continued online, and eventually I graduated in the parking lot of a casino instead of on the football field where graduations had been for decades before. To this day, I never finished my guitar. It’s sitting somewhere in the parts room of the engineering lab at my high school. Who knows, it may have been used by another student looking to get a jump start on their own guitar. The neck is somewhere, halfway filled with frets, begging to be attached to a body. That guitar has always felt like something I let get away from me, something I needed to take with me from my high school years. I also never finished the last shirt I was working on. In fact, I don’t even remember exactly what it was.

But life goes on. I got into Penn State Abington, and basically had what felt like a continuation of my senior year with all the zoom classes from my bed. I started with the intention of doing Penn State’s 2+2 program, where you spend the first two years of school at a satellite campus and transfer to University Park for the final two years. I started in mechanical engineering, and through freshman year it was going well. Most of the classes felt like small continuations of my high school engineering lessons, which I was fine with.

Finally at the start of my sophomore year, a whole year into my college experience, I actually got to walk the Abington campus and attend classes in actual classrooms. Although it was nice to actually get some college experience, this is where things started to sour for me and my aspirations.

Statics. Not statistics, but statics, was the class that made me realize that I did not want to work in STEM. A few short weeks into finding vectors and forces and making calculations was enough for me to realize that my heart just wasn’t in it. Was it hard? Absolutely. One of the hardest classes I’ve ever attempted. But even hard classes, especially hard classes, should be the ones that give you the most joy when you eventually crack them. But I just felt empty. I had a handful of nights in my room just thinking about how I completely wasted my time and ruined my chances at being anything. I realized I liked the idea of engineering, but not any of the actual practices themselves. In hindsight, it seems a little silly of me to not realize that engineering careers and college courses would not be like my high school guitar class or making wooden bird houses.

I decided to change majors. I switched to Corporate Communications. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you how passionate I am for communications or business. But I do think this was the right choice for me. I’ve always liked writing. I may procrastinate with all my papers, but once I get into a writing groove, I sometimes will keep going into the early hours of the morning. The countless pages of first chapters of books I wanted to write have been lost to time, but I still remember them. I often won’t admit it to myself, but I would like to write a story one day. It’s a pipe dream, of course. I don’t even have a solid idea or if it would be realistic or fantasy or whatever, but I think writing would be something I could see myself doing. I also enjoy sharing stories with people. One of my favorite ways of bonding with people is sharing what I’ve experienced or listening to what they’ve experienced. My closest friends are the ones who I can talk to for hours about anything, especially personal things from our lives. I also took up some marketing duties during my time as Engagement Ambassador for SEAL at Penn State Abington where I was partially responsible for creating flyers for our SpringFest, which I think was a good experience and actually scratched a creative itch I felt inside that STEM never could. Speaking of creative itches, it was during my junior year that I finally decided to pick up my Dad’s old guitar and learn to play, which I’m still doing today.

I may not be insanely passionate about corporate communications, but I’m sure that it will point me in the direction of whoever I’m supposed to be. I (hopefully) have my whole life ahead of me; why have it all figured out at 21?