My name is Marie Polo and I’m 18 years old. I’ve lived in Raleigh, NC practically all my life. My parents had 6 kids so i’ve always been around a big family. Growing up, I wanted to be so many different things when I got older. I wanted to be a doctor, dancer, singer, lawyer, teacher, therapist, actress, and even a firefighter. A lot of this came from seeing people around me doing it or on tv. Anything that sounded like fun and was a high paying job was my go to in middle school. That was when I set my mind on being a lawyer. I knew that lawyers got paid a lot from the different researches. I also wanted to make my family proud in choosing such a career. I was set on this and I did not want to change my mind.

Then I went to high school, and being a lawyer didn’t sound assuming as it was anymore. I started to see that it wasn’t going to make me happy. I didn’t want to be doing something for the rest of my life that I would not enjoy. So now I became stuck and didn’t know what to be. My counselors told me that it was normal to not know. So my sophomore year of high school I began doing more and more research to see what interested me. I’ve always had a passion for helping people so I thought about looking into becoming a therapist. I was into it for a month or so but I still didn’t have that pressing passion for that career. That same summer after sophomore year, I had talked to one of my uncles and he encouraged me to go after what will make me wake up in the morning and be excited to go to work. I still thought about it and I came up with nothing.

So Junior year rolled through and I felt like I was clueless because everyone had their careers figured out. I remember that first week of school, we were assigned to write a paper about what we want to do when we grow up. You could imagine the frustration I had at this point. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say so I talked to my teacher. I remember her telling me that I know deep down but I just have to search for it. She knew about my earlier plans to become a lawyer. I told her that being a lawyer wasn’t so much for me because I’m more of a hands on person and I wanted something hands on and something even risky. She then recommended me to go watch NCIS. I took her word on that and I went home and watched it. I enjoyed it very much but I didn’t know if a career like a crime investigator, CIA, or FBI were realistic. She then told me that her brother worked as a crime analyst and that jobs like that were very much realistic. So I started looking more into it. It had finally all made sense to me now. I’ve always wanted to help people, solve problems, and be hands on so this had to be the career that I wanted and needed all along.

So now I’m here at North Carolina Central University majoring in Criminal Justice. I plan to become a Crime Investigator. I know any career isn’t easy and you have to work hard; therefore, I plan to work as hard as I can. This career is a male dominated field so it's going to be a fight but one that I won’t give up on. I can finally write a paper on what I want to be when I get older and say that I can’t wait to wake up years from now to go to work.