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 →