After a 10-hour work day, my feet are swollen, my hands bruised and my back sore...but I'm settled in bed with my favorite celtic band, a bowl of colorful fruit salad, surrounded by wrinkled papers with handwritten notes scrawled across them in countless flurries of ideas and thoughts. I'm trying to create my own major and the effort is both invigorating and daunting. I love the freedom I'm allowing myself, the ability to customize my studies into a perfect culmination of passion, knowledge, interest, and challenge. It's difficult and I'm not guaranteed the faculty committee will approve my proposal - a major like this has never been done before. The unprecedented nature of my idea adds pressure to be perfect, so the late night moon has caught me many times with steaming Turkish coffee (from last year's bedouins), tired eyes, pencil in hand, and pages upon pages of an evolving rough draft proposal.
Each morning I tell my tours to dream big. Wide-eyed highschoolers with astronomical GPAs and SAT scores stare at me when I tell them to look past the stats and percentages of a university...go somewhere you can thrive, I tell them. Go somewhere you can grow. Somewhere that allows you to dream big. Not just allows, but encourages....supports....partners with your dreams. I'm lucky to be in a place that lets me try new things, invent my own curriculum, propose my own education. We'll see if it gets accepted though...for now it's more coffee, polishing rhetoric, and daydreaming at the sky.
If all goes well, I'll graduate with a:
B.A. in Global Development Studies: Public Health & Social Justice
