A Laptop, A Blog, & A Dream

I can hardly believe that my summer is already winding down to a close - my first day of college starts in exactly one week! I've been waiting what seems like a very long time to be able to say that, and now that it is finally a reality, "ecstatic" seems to be the only appropriate form of expression.

Everyone always tells you that college is supposed to be a time to find yourself, to try new things, to put yourself out there and just go for it. People go to college for all kinds of reasons. There's medical school. Law School. Theater majors. Business majors. Some want to be teachers. Others have an interest in sports. All good things. But me? I have a different dream.

I've been working part-time at a restaurant for a few months now, and a couple people I work with think I'm delirious for pursuing a major in journalism, mainly because a lot of newspapers are going out of business, so they think that jobs will be harder for me to find. While I understand where they're coming from, that's definitely not true. With the explosion of news sites on the internet and TV ads and whatnot, I think more jobs are opening up (i.e. book editor, content producer, copy writer, grant writer, news service writer, newsletter writer, publications specialist, sports information director, or a technical writer, to name a few). Any one of those job offers would be fantastic.

Now, the reason I've chosen journalism as a career path is because I've always believed that a pen is mightier than a sword, meaning that a person's thoughts and opinions have a huge influence over the world, whereas from what I've seen, violence and war only add to the problem. Just look at writers like Leo Tolstoy with War and Peace, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or the influence of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway. If I were a journalist, then my thoughts and the thoughts of people smarter than me could be much better heard and turned into actions.

I might as well get this out now - the first way I'm hoping on doing so is by joining the Peace Corps after college. Since about the beginning of my junior year of high school, I've been tossing this idea around in my head. And after traveling to the Dominican Republic and partaking in a similar mission last summer, that basically affirmed my ambition to do so sometime in my life. I'm hoping that my volunteer work in the Peace Corps will include giving reading, writing and art lessons to elementary school kids.