My path to becoming an English Major
As an English Major, I am constantly delving into and analyzing all sorts of literature which includes novels, essays, journals, short stories, news papers, and perhaps every sort of written material imaginable. With so much literary exposure, it was only a matter of time before I was to encounter a genre of writing called the literary narrative. Many writers come to that point in their literary careers where they feel compelled to share their personal story with their fan base. Therefore, it isn’t uncommon to stumble across such casual autobiographies with titles such as, “Why I Write,” “The Makings of an Author,” or even as Eudora Welty put it in her memoirs “One Writer’s Beginnings.” In reading through so many literary narratives for an assignment in my English e-portfolio class, I couldn’t help but to begin thinking about my own little narrative of sorts.
The story of my rather arduous journey of becoming an English Major began to unfold a long time ago, back in the somewhat rural suburbs of Suffolk Virginia, where I grew up as a kid exploring the mysteries of nature’s allure in the scanty patches of woods near my childhood home, or tirelessly frolicking about under the immense firmament of Jove’s blue sky. My imagination was perhaps as wild and free as the most savage of creatures to be found in the wild. For all one knows, I might as well have been some sort of deer or rabbit, or even a crazy squirrel rummaging about under the shade of some large oak tree. The possibilities harbored within the mind of a child of my stature were almost endless. Feral exposure to the wonders of the great outdoors during my adolescence has undoubtedly left me with a strong fascination and deep rooted bond to nature, which has followed me throughout much of my life. I have oftentimes wondered if the rustic nature of my childhood experiences in any way reflected the long forgotten background which so inspired much of the beauty found in the writings of Emerson or Thoreau.
Throughout my young adult life, I have undergone quite an arduous process of refining myself, learning about who I really am as a person, and what exactly it is that I want to do with my life. I guess the late teens and early twenties serve as a robust sculpting process – which can be rather painful at times – in chipping away the rough edges to eventually leave a well polished adult in its wake. Little did I know that my childhood passions would inevitably lead me down the wrong path through much of my college experience, as I chose to follow these desires by pursuing Biology and natural sciences for my major and future career path. I immediately fell in love with biology as a subject; but unfortunately, my mind was never geared towards excelling in math and science, though I tried time and time again.
Over the course of several years, I briefly attended several colleges and universities, but was I forced into taking long hiatuses due to stents of military service. Back in the early fall of 2003 while I was attending my first College, Virginia Military Institute, the ROTC department talked me into joining the Virginia Army National Guard so that I could take advantage of the GI Bill and various other educational benefits offered by the government. It was not too long after I signed the National Guard contract that I began to hate my VMI ratline experience, because something about the mix of the burdensome corps of cadets’ life with a demanding college workload didn’t settle so well with me. So it was not so long before I dropped out of VMI and then decided to be shipped off to basic training. Unfortunately, nobody told me that it was a bad idea to join the National Guard in pursuit of college benefits during a time of war.
Upon returning from Basic Training, I was accepted into James Madison University as a Biology major. Two weeks into my first semester there, I received a dire phone call that my unit was getting deployed to Iraq and my name was on the roster to go. I spent a total of a year and a half on deployment to the scorching hot sands of Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After my triumphant return home – I say triumphant because I was happy to be alive to tell the story – I went back to James Madison University as Biology major. Things did not work out in my favor, however, because I was suffering from a severe case of PTSD at the time. Instead of going to class and diligently applying myself in my studies, I preferred to wallow around my dorm room, drinking myself into a pool of misery. Upon not completing the two semesters that I attended at JMU, I was forced to leave in order to figure out my problems and come to terms with myself.
Somewhere along the way, I figured things out and decided to again try my luck at obtaining higher education. I enrolled into a local community college and made straight A’s throughout that semester. It is funny to see how life has that knack of throwing crazy curve balls when life seems to be finally going well. It was not too long before I received another one of those grim phone calls telling me that my unit was preparing to deploy to Iraq and, of course, my name was on the roster. This time, I knew what to expect during deployment, and thus my combat experiences did not faze me as much. In fact I was able to help some other soldiers that were going through the issues I experienced my first time over to the sandbox. I returned from this deployment having a stronger sense of myself and a greater resolve to continue my education. Two years later, I finally earned my associates degree in Science with a focus in biology. With a lot of hard work and an excellent GPA under my belt, it was time to again return to a big, four year university. I chose to make Virginia Tech my next academic abode.
Upon entering my studies at Virginia Tech as a Biology major, I quickly found that I could never hope to graduate with a biology degree and study wildlife habitats as I had so desired. The math requirements for all science majors have an adept knack for weeding out the mathematically weaker species of students in some grand “survival of the fittest” notion. It was not two weeks into my calculus two class that I began to feel the impending doom of never understanding math, and the mathematical principles governing higher levels of science. The professor could have been squawking like a mind-cracked parrot or speaking in ancient Greek for all I knew. I just couldn’t grasp the most basic concepts of Calculus. Such desperation at my mathematical failures led me to beg the question of what I should do to ensure my success as a college student. I figured that I had always loved to write, and perhaps I would love to write a novel one day, so I entertained the thought of becoming an English major. The more I pondered upon the decisions I faced, the more and more I began to like the idea. It finally hit me that I needed to change my major to English as soon as possible.
So here I am! I am now embarking upon my first semester as a new English major. Who knows what the future may hold, or what I will end up pursuing with my newly found path. I remain optimistic and confident that I will enjoy building upon my knowledge of literature and perfecting my writing craft. I guess it does take some people longer than others to discover who they really are and what they want to do in life. Our paths are all unique. I have always loved to write and express my thoughts with words, so perhaps, after such a long and arduous journey I have finally found my comfortable little niche in the grand scheme of things. The question now remains; where will the future take me?
As an English Major, I am constantly delving into and analyzing all sorts of literature which includes novels, essays, journals, short stories, news papers, and perhaps every sort of written material imaginable. With so much literary exposure, it was only a matter of time before I was to encounter a genre of writing called the literary narrative. Many writers come to that point in their literary careers where they feel compelled to share their personal story with their fan base. Therefore, it isn’t uncommon to stumble across such casual autobiographies with titles such as, “Why I Write,” “The Makings of an Author,” or even as Eudora Welty put it in her memoirs “One Writer’s Beginnings.” In reading through so many literary narratives for an assignment in my English e-portfolio class, I couldn’t help but to begin thinking about my own little narrative of sorts.
The story of my rather arduous journey of becoming an English Major began to unfold a long time ago, back in the somewhat rural suburbs of Suffolk Virginia, where I grew up as a kid exploring the mysteries of nature’s allure in the scanty patches of woods near my childhood home, or tirelessly frolicking about under the immense firmament of Jove’s blue sky. My imagination was perhaps as wild and free as the most savage of creatures to be found in the wild. For all one knows, I might as well have been some sort of deer or rabbit, or even a crazy squirrel rummaging about under the shade of some large oak tree. The possibilities harbored within the mind of a child of my stature were almost endless. Feral exposure to the wonders of the great outdoors during my adolescence has undoubtedly left me with a strong fascination and deep rooted bond to nature, which has followed me throughout much of my life. I have oftentimes wondered if the rustic nature of my childhood experiences in any way reflected the long forgotten background which so inspired much of the beauty found in the writings of Emerson or Thoreau.
Throughout my young adult life, I have undergone quite an arduous process of refining myself, learning about who I really am as a person, and what exactly it is that I want to do with my life. I guess the late teens and early twenties serve as a robust sculpting process – which can be rather painful at times – in chipping away the rough edges to eventually leave a well polished adult in its wake. Little did I know that my childhood passions would inevitably lead me down the wrong path through much of my college experience, as I chose to follow these desires by pursuing Biology and natural sciences for my major and future career path. I immediately fell in love with biology as a subject; but unfortunately, my mind was never geared towards excelling in math and science, though I tried time and time again.
Over the course of several years, I briefly attended several colleges and universities, but was I forced into taking long hiatuses due to stents of military service. Back in the early fall of 2003 while I was attending my first College, Virginia Military Institute, the ROTC department talked me into joining the Virginia Army National Guard so that I could take advantage of the GI Bill and various other educational benefits offered by the government. It was not too long after I signed the National Guard contract that I began to hate my VMI ratline experience, because something about the mix of the burdensome corps of cadets’ life with a demanding college workload didn’t settle so well with me. So it was not so long before I dropped out of VMI and then decided to be shipped off to basic training. Unfortunately, nobody told me that it was a bad idea to join the National Guard in pursuit of college benefits during a time of war.
Upon returning from Basic Training, I was accepted into James Madison University as a Biology major. Two weeks into my first semester there, I received a dire phone call that my unit was getting deployed to Iraq and my name was on the roster to go. I spent a total of a year and a half on deployment to the scorching hot sands of Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After my triumphant return home – I say triumphant because I was happy to be alive to tell the story – I went back to James Madison University as Biology major. Things did not work out in my favor, however, because I was suffering from a severe case of PTSD at the time. Instead of going to class and diligently applying myself in my studies, I preferred to wallow around my dorm room, drinking myself into a pool of misery. Upon not completing the two semesters that I attended at JMU, I was forced to leave in order to figure out my problems and come to terms with myself.
Somewhere along the way, I figured things out and decided to again try my luck at obtaining higher education. I enrolled into a local community college and made straight A’s throughout that semester. It is funny to see how life has that knack of throwing crazy curve balls when life seems to be finally going well. It was not too long before I received another one of those grim phone calls telling me that my unit was preparing to deploy to Iraq and, of course, my name was on the roster. This time, I knew what to expect during deployment, and thus my combat experiences did not faze me as much. In fact I was able to help some other soldiers that were going through the issues I experienced my first time over to the sandbox. I returned from this deployment having a stronger sense of myself and a greater resolve to continue my education. Two years later, I finally earned my associates degree in Science with a focus in biology. With a lot of hard work and an excellent GPA under my belt, it was time to again return to a big, four year university. I chose to make Virginia Tech my next academic abode.
Upon entering my studies at Virginia Tech as a Biology major, I quickly found that I could never hope to graduate with a biology degree and study wildlife habitats as I had so desired. The math requirements for all science majors have an adept knack for weeding out the mathematically weaker species of students in some grand “survival of the fittest” notion. It was not two weeks into my calculus two class that I began to feel the impending doom of never understanding math, and the mathematical principles governing higher levels of science. The professor could have been squawking like a mind-cracked parrot or speaking in ancient Greek for all I knew. I just couldn’t grasp the most basic concepts of Calculus. Such desperation at my mathematical failures led me to beg the question of what I should do to ensure my success as a college student. I figured that I had always loved to write, and perhaps I would love to write a novel one day, so I entertained the thought of becoming an English major. The more I pondered upon the decisions I faced, the more and more I began to like the idea. It finally hit me that I needed to change my major to English as soon as possible.
So here I am! I am now embarking upon my first semester as a new English major. Who knows what the future may hold, or what I will end up pursuing with my newly found path. I remain optimistic and confident that I will enjoy building upon my knowledge of literature and perfecting my writing craft. I guess it does take some people longer than others to discover who they really are and what they want to do in life. Our paths are all unique. I have always loved to write and express my thoughts with words, so perhaps, after such a long and arduous journey I have finally found my comfortable little niche in the grand scheme of things. The question now remains; where will the future take me?