When I was little, the words, “What do you want to be when you grow up” were always on my mind. I knew from the moment I was born that I wanted to do something great with my life, and I knew I wasn’t going to waste my one life on something that didn’t mean anything to me.
So, you can imagine the panic I felt when I ended my junior year not having a clue what I was going to do after graduation.
Growing up, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher just like my mom and many of the other women in my family. I knew that math and science were not my strong suits and that I hated blood and needles, so I decided I wanted to be a teacher.
As time went on and I eventually started high school, I began to break down the reasons why I wanted to be a teacher. I realized that while I wanted to help people, maybe teaching wasn’t the right path for me. I started to consider other pathways of helping people like therapy and counseling, and I also found a university during my freshman year of high school that I was convinced was the perfect school for me.
That is until I reached my junior year of high school and I very clearly saw that psychology was another profession that I was not meant for. I’d reached a low point in my life and really wasn’t sure about anything anymore.
At this time, I was working as a student broadcaster, and I found that not only was I pretty good at it, but I also liked it. I knew though that I didn’t want to make a career out of it, and it was at this time that a lot of people recommended that I look into majoring in communications.
I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, and to make matters worse, my original dream school didn’t have the communications program I was looking for. I was left feeling completely lost.
Then my family took a spontaneous trip to the Northeast the summer before my senior year. We spent the day in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a rainy Sunday morning in August, and we were headed to mass at the St. Anthony Shrine. After mass, I met with the friar who had said mass there, and what originally started as me just thanking him for saying mass eventually ventured into talking about colleges. I told him about the school I wanted to go to and how I didn’t think it would work out, and he said,
“Have you heard of St. Bonaventure University? You should look into it.”
I said I hadn’t, and that pretty much ended the conversation. At the time, I didn’t really think much of it, and I kind of brushed the comment off, but later my dad and I looked into the school a little more and shockingly found it had everything I was looking for. The only things holding me back were finances and the fact it was in Western New York, and I live in Eugene, Oregon.
Months went by, and after hours of writing scholarship essays and financial aid letters and what felt like an eternity of worrying if I was making a huge mistake, I was able to commit to St. Bonaventure University. I somehow managed to get my tuition to a reasonable price for me, and miraculously my family and I managed to figure out the travel from New York to Oregon.
Flash forward to week four of my freshman year of college at St. Bonaventure as a strategic communications major, and all I can say is that whether you believe in fate or not, I know for certain that the meeting with that friar was not a coincidence. While I still don’t quite know where my journey here will go, and despite having my original plan flipped on its head, I can finally make peace with the fact that not everything is in my control. I am now looking forward to all the new twists and turns that life has in store for me and am going to try to let myself let go of that grasp on control.