Off of face value, Professor Firgen’s, my Public Speaking teacher, may seem like a regular guy going through life like the rest of us. This is not the case. Starting off college with the hopes of becoming a pilot, he entered a business major thinking that would be where he ended up degree wise. “Flight Companies love degrees, so I decided to go into college to obtain a business degree, but as it turns out I’m terrible at math.” He told me after I asked where his college career started. After coming to this realization, he decided to pursue a communications degree and immediately fell in love with public speaking. He is currently going into his last year of his graduate program at Penn State and plans to become a public speaking professor at a university that he does not know of yet. His passion for flight has been put on hold due to the shear amount of money that needs to be put in it, but he plans to continue this dream at some point in his life. Through all my years of schooling, I have never met a teacher that was serious about becoming a pilot and for that, this makes Prof. Firgens one of the most interesting teachers I have ever had.

After he had told me about what his aspirations were, we began to talk about myself and how I want to become a biomedical engineer. Starting this plan in the beginning of my senior year of high school, I fell in love with the medical field through a program I took through my high school that took up half of each school day during my last year of high school. Studying at a PSU Branch Campus two days out of the week, taking classes at a local nursing school also for two days out of the week, and shadowing at the Reading Hospital on Friday’s were what this program consisted of. Loving every bit of it, I wanted to apply my math skills and my biology skills to take on becoming a biomedical engineer that designs and creates machinery used in a hospital. Appreciating each bit of my story, we began relating how our lives are similar and how his brother and wife both have careers in the medical field. He personally is very interested in it, but took a different path career wise. Wrapping up the chat after about 25 minutes, we parted ways knowing aspects of each other that we never would have found out without this assignment. Going forward, I plan to try and create a more personal relationship with each professor I have, to create a sense of  similarity that would not happen without initiating conversation. This may not be possible in classes of hundreds of students, but in other scenarios I will try!