The start of the school year can be incredibly stressful - especially when you’re a senior in high school. There are so many things up in the air that you don’t know the answer to. “Where do I want to go to school?” “Will I get enough financial aid, if any?” “What do I want to major in?”

The one question that’s been weighing on my mind heavily “will my standardized math scores be good enough?”

See, I don’t want to go to school for a career that would require me to take a lot of math classes. I do not know for sure what I want to do with my life, but I know that math is something I will not be doing.

I want to have a career in English or social work. Maybe even communications and journalism. None of those careers or majors need me to have specialized skills in mathematics.

I’ve struggled to decide that I truly want a career that has to do with writing because in our society it can be seen as quite an unreliable career.

Why is it that math is such a deciding factor in my life, even if I don’t want a career that has anything to do with it? Why do many consider a career in journalism or novel writing to be less than that of a chemist?

Language is the basis of most things.

Afterall, if it weren’t for your language teachers you wouldn’t be able to read this.

Once people learn the basis of their language - in my case English - they often forget its importance and the impact it has on this world. If it weren’t for language, we would have no way to communicate the amazing scientific findings or new mathematical equations.

When we’re young many of us have an of what we want to be when we grow up. For me when I was young I always said I wanted to be a writer. As I started getting older that changed.

I always loved reading and writing; that never changed - but the way I looked at it did. From what I could tell, as a child was that the world mostly viewed writing a novel as what a “writer” would do while they were pursuing more realistic professional goals.

I started to tell myself that having a job in the English field was ridiculous and I would never make money off of it because I was always told the best money was in more traditional career paths, but I wasn’t good at math or science. This left me feeling like I wasn’t good enough and there wasn’t a career path that I could be happy doing and make money of off for years.

It wasn’t until recently that I decided after a long talk with my father that I would do what made me happy - write. The money would come with hard work regardless of what I decided to do.

If you’re going to work hard towards something and spend your time doing it, it should be something you feel is worth working towards. We need to stop telling kids who want to pursue a career in language that it isn’t a realistic goal just because it takes a lot of hard work.

The truth is making a career out of profession is hard work - but if you love it the hard work is truly worth it in the end.

Careers in language and creative careers, in general, are just as important as math and science - let’s start acting like it.