Hello readers,
Let’s begin with a joke...
Me: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Copernicus: Despite the evidence of your senses, I can show that it is mathematically simpler to describe it as the road passing under the chicken.
Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross roads.
Van de Graaf: Hey, doesn’t it look funny with all of its feathers sticking up like that?
Enrico Fermi: In estimating to the nearest power of 10 the number of chickens that cross the road, note that since fractional chickens are not allowed, the desired power must be at least zero. Therefore, at least one chicken crosses the road.
...And now, my attempt at a short explanation of how I became that chicken.
I should’ve known. All the signs were there at my FASET session and phase II registration. Initially, I enrolled in a Spanish class. Two weeks later, I dropped Spanish and enrolled in Russian and Arabic. Then I panicked, wondering how I was going to be able to simultaneously learn two languages who had alphabets completely different from English. Soon afterwards, I was back into Spanish.
Indecisive much?
Oh yes. Should I cross the road, and if so, why should I cross it? The thing that scared me most of all about this whole process was that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I will now modify a quote from Hamlet, “To be, or not to be [a Russian major or a Spanish major] – that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the sling and arrows of outrageous [alphabets] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [the Spanish subjunctive tense of conjugations] and by opposing end them…” Willy Shakes is the man, am I right, or am I right?
To put things into context, I’ll tell you a little bit more about my background in Spanish. I began taking Spanish classes in middle school, and I took AP Spanish Language my junior year of high school. I have achieved a high enough degree of fluency that it is often assumed that I am from Spain or Mexico (in short, my accent is on fleek). I’ve traveled to Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Spain. This fall, I am taking Spanish 3101, a conversation class.
I have always held a passion for world events and languages, and Spanish will always occupy a special place in my heart as the first “foreign” language I’ve learned. Usually, you take classes in subjects you are interested in to streamline your passions, but in this case, I found out that I was ready to branch out and explore new things. So, I have officially become an International Affairs and Russian major. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yep, there’s nothing wrong with changing your major because what matters at the end of the day is that you’re doing something that makes you happy.
After all, maybe you’re not the chicken who takes the straight path across the road. Maybe you’re the chicken who runs in circles for a little bit, dodges a few cars along the way, gets distracted by the paint on the pavement, and then arrives on the other side.
I’ll let you know how it is once I get there.
Until then,
Engineer Taylor