I will graduate this spring of 2017 with a dual degree in Linguistics and Spanish, but a little over four years ago this wasn’t my plan at all. I was accepted to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as an undergraduate Biochemistry major, and that was what I was for the first semester of my college career. As the fall semester of my senior year comes to a close, I feel that now is a good time to look back and reflect on my journey so far in order to make sense of how I went from a biochemist to a linguist.

Growing up I always knew that I wanted to study animals and after high school I had narrowed things down to studying animal genetics. I had always been fascinated with animals, evolution and genetic engineering so it seemed like an excellent choice for me. After the first few months of my freshman year, things were going well. I enjoyed my science classes and I was doing well in them. However I hated the labs, and started to dread the day I would have to start working in a laboratory. This was a huge red flag for a biochemistry major and to be honest I was scared. I didn’t want to commit to the major and end up hating the life long career that followed. So I began looking for alternatives.

The spring semester of my sophomore year I started to take Spanish classes again. At this time I was still a biochemistry major but with severe doubts. I had taken French and Spanish in high school and have always enjoyed learning languages and that got me thinking about possibly being a foreign language teacher. My foreign language classes were some of my favorite in high school and I wanted to be just as good of a teacher as some of the ones I had in high school so very quickly I decided to pursue teaching. That same semester I took Introductory Linguistics and loved the class taught by Kyle Johnson. By the end of the spring semester I was a joint Linguistics and Spanish major.

Soon I was on track to complete the Student Teacher Educator’s Program (STEP) and I would be a licensed Spanish teacher upon finishing my bachelor’s degree. I had taken all the state written and oral exams, written papers, taken education classes, and started my student teaching pre-practicum. 95% of the way there and then I realized that teaching is definitely not for me. I’m impatient, quiet and much rather work as an individual, (arguably terrible qualities for a prospective high school teacher). Luckily for me I kept my options open by studying Linguistics along with Spanish and now going into my final semester, I plan on obtaining a Master’s of Science in Computational Linguistics where I will work with computers and natural language processing. This path seems like a happy medium between my linguistic and scientific interests and I am excited to see where this new directions takes me.