A Discovered Passion by Lauren

A Discovered Passion by Lauren - September 2017 Scholarship Essay

Throughout all my years of high school I had countless visions of what I wanted to be when I grew up. From accounting to aerospace engineering, all those dreams had slowly lost my interest and I approached senior year still clueless about my future plans. It wasn’t until I enrolled in AP Statistics that I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
I had always been interested and pretty successful in my math classes, but to me it never seemed reasonable to further my education in that subject. Although I know how to adequately take the derivative of a function, how far can that really take me in life? I had chosen AP Statistics as an elective because I knew I would enjoy it, but it wasn’t until the first day of school that I fell in love with it. From the second class started down to the second it ended, statistics had me fully captivated. This was a math class different than any I had ever taken. Every single problem performed is based off of real life situations, and is extremely applicable and necessary for the real world. I had finally found the perfect course that satisfied both my interest in mathematics and sense of realism.
As I am currently nearing my fifth week of senior year, statistics has yet to lose the slightest bit of interest from me. Every day I enter that classroom eager to learn more and expand my knowledge with a passion that has not been present for any other class throughout these past four years. With hunger for more statistics, I began to research majors that are based around this class. This is how I came across actuarial science. I had been familiar with the name of that major, but never really knew what it entailed and never took the time to research it. It wasn’t until it popped up while searching for statistics majors that I gained some knowledge. As I read further into the details of actuarial science, I had come to a realization that it was the major for me. This sense of sureness was different than that of my past and dead dreams, this one felt permanent.
I never knew a single elective could have such a huge impact on my future education and career. If I had never enrolled in AP Statistics, there is a great chance that I would have never discovered my passion for this particular field. Now as the holidays are approaching, the dreaded “So what do you want to do with your life?” question relatives always ask, doesn’t seem so bad.