In high school my typical everyday worries were things like where I was going to go to college and what I was going to study. I knew that I definitely wanted to go to college but I was completely indecisive about where and what I would study.
When I was much younger I was always a home body. I had never been out of the country and I had only travelled with my family to various states in the East Coast. When I was a junior in high school something sparked my travel bug. We had a presentation one day from The Experiment in International Living, a non-profit organization that sends groups of high school students from across the United States to over thirty countries around the world. I became heavily involved with Spanish in school but I never really thought about travelling. After the presentation I received a brochure booklet of all the programs that EIL offered. Overwhelmed with the amount of choices, I kept flipping to the same page every single time I opened the book; Argentina.
That next summer I went on the adventure of a lifetime. There was so much planned for the short month that we had there. Some of the activities included white water rafting, hiking, horseback riding through the mountains, a fourteen-day homestay, and forty hours of community service by the end of the trip. This trip literally changed my life.
When I returned to school after that summer for my senior year, I decided that I wanted to do an Independent Study in Service Learning. Service learning was one of the most rewarding classes I was able to take in high school. I worked with second grade students in my hometown of Rye, NH for a portion of the days, and on the other days I went to an elementary school in Portsmouth, NH where I worked with a second grade ESOL student.
For my independent study I went back with the second grade teacher from the previous year to assistant teach for two days of the week. Another two days I was working one on one with the same student from Portsmouth who was now in third grade. On the one extra day I was working on fundraising and marketing for our school trip to Costa Rica, and with The Experiment in International Living as an ambassador recruiting other students who were interested in doing a summer study abroad program.
As a senior in high school my independent study was supposed to allow me to figure out what I may want to do in college. Wrong. I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing for the life of me. I looked at every single program in all of the schools I had applied to and none of them fit even close to what I wanted to do.
Interdisciplinary Studies was never something that I was taught about before. We are taught that you have to choose one major and maybe add a minor, but that wasn’t the case for me. I wanted to do everything. When I finally learned about the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Plymouth State University I was ecstatic. For me, this was a success. I had finally defeated the ever so prevalent question of “What next?” Who knew that Interdisciplinary Studies would be my answer?
Although my success story is still being written, I consider this an extremely important part of who I am and how I will continue to be successful no matter what.
Video Credit: "Plymouth State University | PSU in Two: Dillon Bissell." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 22 Feb. 2016.
Photo Credit: Janet Currier
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