An Interesting Indecision by Joseph

An Interesting Indecision by Joseph - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

Around thanksgiving, when I was six or seven years old, one of my relatives asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. Instantly, I said that I wanted to be a rock star.
It has occurred to me since then that I hadn’t listened to rock at that point in my life, and probably didn’t really have much of an idea of what a rock star did, but I knew it was cool, and that that was something that I wanted to do. Of course, I eventually realized that I probably didn’t want to be a rock star. I figured out in the second grade when performing in drama class that I had stage fright, and it wasn’t too long after that I realized I had little to no musical ability.
Unlike most kids, though, I never picked another future job. Whenever someone asked me, I just said, “I don’t know”, and moved on. Sometimes I would be asked to pick a career for school projects, but lawyer and pathologist weren’t really careers that I had any serious intention of doing. Learning and school were my main interests at the time. I loved to read, and play with my brothers, but that was just about it.
Once I went into high school, I’m pretty sure I got even more indecisive about my “dream job”. I found out that I enjoyed almost all of my classes, even if I my grades were low in them. I was good at english, and especially enjoyed creative writing. I enjoyed every single science class, and got really involved in history. I even enjoyed photography. My classes didn’t narrow down my choices on what I wanted to do: they expanded them. I went from simply not having a clue because I didn’t know what I liked, to not having a clue because I liked just about everything.
However, I did have a little bit of a favorite. My sophomore year in high school, I started Integrated Math II with Mr. Jenkins. He was a bit of an unorthodox teacher, who was more concerned with us learning the concepts and growing as human beings than he was about grades. As a part of his teaching method, and in a shot for us to be a part of a little community, he pulled some strings in with the office, and had it arranged that we would be a part of his math class until math five. I found out over the course of his class that I could do the math, if I was given enough time, and that I enjoyed figuring out the problems. Math became more like a fun puzzle to solve, rather than the rather mediocre and frustrating subject that it was before. So, I kept going with math, taking both calculus and statistics my senior year. While I had a little bit of a problem with the more rigid format of my calculus class, I found both of them to be very interesting. It is because of my experience with math that, even though I’m not fully decided, I’m considering pursuing a degree in mathematics or statistics in college.
All considered, while I may not be pursuing my six year old self’s dream of being a major rock star, my experiences since then have helped me to find out all kinds of things that I enjoy doing, and has set me on the path to what I hope may be a future career as a statistician.