I wanted to be a professional athlete. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a politician. I wanted to be a financial analyst. I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to be a speech pathologist. When I was going into college I had every intention of becoming a United States senator in the future.

I found out rather quickly that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I could barely pick out clothes that made it seem like I had some sense of style; even if it was an odd and rather unappealing one. The very thought of letting almost twenty-year-old me today make that decision is risky, let alone the creepy and awkward kid that I was in high school. My style has definitely improved drastically but I now look like a young soccer dad that is running late for the five o’clock water aerobics class at the YMCA, but I digress. Anyways the point I’m trying to get across is that growing up is hard. And I have no idea how I’m expected to know what I want to be for the rest of my life if ordering off the menu at a local coffee shop gives me anxiety. I know what I would like to do, but I don’t know if it’s practical enough for the rest of my life. Deciding whether something was practical enough is the blockade that was sending my sanity into tailspins. I would weigh my options but could fin myself committing to it due to the thought, "This isn't something practical enough to allow me to support my family and I while living a somewhat comfortable life It wasn’t until very recently when I started thinking about what my next steps in my degree plan should be that I began struggling with the question if the academic plan I am on right now will provide me happiness in the long run. Because the last thing I want to do is spend thousands of dollars on a degree. A big fear that I have that sparked that question is that I do not want to end up in a job that I hate going to every day just because it provides very well for me financially. I started thinking about the things that I’m passionate or interested in.

Having been born and raised in West Texas, energy resources were all around me, whether it was the oil field industry or the wind turbine farms that started popping up. Something about energy and how we as society use it fueled my curiosity causing me to dive in for more information (clever and witty pun/dad joke). Out of all of the uncertainties in my life, the one thing that I was certain about was that I wanted to make a difference on society. This is when it finally hit me, Wind energy is something that is on the rise across the nation and my school happened to be in the game. When I thought of being involved in it I was just thinking of financially benefits as my sole draw in, I had a genuine feeling that this was something that could spend the rest of my life doing because I could see myself looking forward to going to my job every day. I also thought this could be a vital lesson to my eventual kids that’s not what others want you to be, you have to follow your heart or else you’re not truly being yourself (DON’T STARTING WORRYING MOM, this will not be for a while, like late twenties because I’m planning on adopting a kid but again I digress). Of course, there’s a very high chance that I still don’t know what I want to do with rest of my life because commitment issues are very real for me. One last thought that I want to leave for anyone that is currently experiencing the same struggle as me comes from something a wise person once said,

“When life gets you down, you know what you gotta do? Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming, JUST KEEP SWIMMING, SWIMMING, SWIMMING”.