The Paper That Prompted Self-Discovery by Isaiah

The Paper That Prompted Self-Discovery by Isaiah - July 2021 Scholarship Essay

The most unexpected thing I learned came from my high school English class during my sophomore year. Part of the reason that it was unexpected was because the revelation ultimately had nothing to do with literature, MLA format, or anything else that you might learn in your standard English class. The other part of the reason I was shocked with what I discovered was because I thought I knew myself and my aspirations rather well. Clearly that wasn’t the case, because writing one research paper was all it took to completely change my career goals for the future.
As a kid I always enjoyed making things with my hands. Whether the material was paper, Play-Doh, or (my personal favorite) Legos, creating physical objects from my imagination always brought me joy. My passion for building things from scratch and my creative mind is what led me to desire a career as an architect at a young age. I didn't know everything there was to know about architecture, but it was the "creating something out of nothing" aspect that appealed to me the most. As I got older I realized that such a career could benefit others as well. I could go on to build churches, schools, or that "house with a large porch" that my mom always talked about. At the time a career as an architect seemed like the dream career for me. It wasn't until my sophomore year that I found a different career path to be much more appealing.
The final paper that was assigned in my sophomore English class was a career research paper that essentially involved picking two interesting careers, comparing the pros and cons, and then ultimately choosing the career that you'd want to pursue. Going into this final paper I thought that I would just find more aspects to encourage me to pursue a career in architecture, but boy, was I wrong. I decided to actually do some thorough research and find a second career that seemed somewhat appealing to me for my research paper. The second career I decided to go with was a multimedia artist. After going into thorough research of both these careers I realized that a career in multimedia was the career that I wanted to pursue. After looking at what an architect actually does I discovered that such a career involved a lot more education, exams, limits, and structure than I had previously thought. A career as a multimedia artist involved so much more creativity and artistic skill, but most importantly such a career would allow me to carry my passion for filmmaking and game design into my work. After completing that paper, my goals after high school completely shifted and I began to express my creative side more so through media than physical creations. It was because of that one paper that I began to look into colleges that specialized in cinema and media arts rather than architecture and as a result I ended up attending a completely different college than I had originally intended. I’m thankful for the unexpected lesson I learned about myself in my sophomore English class because it pushed me in a new direction that ultimately led me to pursue the true career of my dreams and meet so many new people that I wouldn’t have been able to meet otherwise.