As my time at UMass is coming to an end, I’m both excited and anxious about my graduation. Sending out job applications and trying to metaphorically sell myself to potential employers has made me evaluate exactly what my education has provided me with and how well prepared for the professional world I am. Although hindsight is 20/20, there are a few things I would have done differently if given the change to “re-do” college. Continue reading →

Although most students are counting down the days until they leave for their study abroad adventure, I was completely dreading it. I started panicking about going abroad about a year before I actually left, but I convinced myself that, as a Spanish major, I had to do it. I was looking forward to the prospect of bettering my Spanish and living in a picturesque Spanish city, but I really had no desire to leave my family and comfortable daily routine.

As a kid, I never went to sleep away camps. Going to college an hour and a half away from my home was a traumatic experience to say the least. In my twenty years of life, the longest I had gone without seeing my family was probably three weeks. Moreover, I tend to have a very strict daily routine; it’s just my personality. So, when it came time to get myself on a plain to Madrid with a bunch of people I didn’t know, going to a city I’d never been to, and living with a host mom I’d never met, to say I was freaking out is an understatement.

Ultimately, I made friends. I didn’t want to go home. Continue reading →

I was never a kid who had a dream job at five years old. A look back at my academic career shows a smorgasbord of decisions and dead-ends that luckily have led me to a major in Spanish. While I was attending high school, I was one hundred percent certain that I would never have a concentration of Spanish in college. Truthfully, I could not see the benefit in having a degree in another language, seeing as I was already fluent in English and Polish. So I pushed aside the fact that my favorite classes had always been my Spanish ones and I ignored that studying languages and cultures were the only subjects that had ever excited me, and I wasted a lot of time intending to choose a different concentration. I came into UMass as a student in Isenberg: I thought that maybe business management was my calling. In reality, I had no clue what a person majoring in this field actually did and within the first few days in class it became apparent that whatever my life ambitions were- they were not those of a business student. I was constantly bored listening about how to maximize profits, and how to follow the capitalist system blindly. More than anything, I missed thinking critically about things, so I impulsively changed my major to linguistics. Linguistic theory fascinated me, but yet again, I soon found something about it that I just didn’t like. It had no real application to help society at large- I could help expand academic knowledge by studying it, but that would not improve the lives of common people in any way. I realized that I wanted to study something that would allow me to help people, and linguistics was not the way to do that. Since this major had also disappointed me, I searched and thought I found something that met the criteria I was searching for, something that included critical thinking but also actively helped people: communication disorders. I dedicated myself to this primary major completely, though through all of this I always had Spanish as a minor. Continue reading →