When we get the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” when we are children we come up with amazing ideas of what we want to be: a movie star, fireman, doctor, teacher, astronaut, pro-athlete, or a scientist. When I was younger I wanted to be a singer. I love to sing. I was put in lessons for a long time, but when it came down to singing and soccer, I picked soccer. I didn’t want to be a soccer player when I grew up, but it, unfortunately, became apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be the next Justin Bieber and be found by Usher off of YouTube. Soccer also meant being with my best friends, and I couldn’t pass that up.
When picking what you want to grow up to be, you have to make sacrifices to get there. People mostly sacrifice time - time with friends, family, for hobbies, or fun. People then have to put that time into four to six hours of school and four hours of homework a day. For those who pay their own way through college, their day consists of the same hours of school and schoolwork, plus 20 more hours of work a week on top of that. I always feel bad telling my mom I can't come visit because I have to spend six hours in a library that day doing work that doesn't apply to my major. But my sacrifice was definitely ending singing because it lessened my schedule and I was able to focus more on school to get to the amazing university I am at today.
Even though stopping something I loved lessened my workload, I still sacrifice time…a lot of time. I have three classes Monday-Friday until 12:30, then I nanny Monday-Wednesday from 2:15 to 4:30 and Thursdays from 4:00 to 11:00. I spend at least three hours a day doing homework, and two hours a week writing articles like this (that time though is due to writer’s block). Most of my free time is then taken up from responsibilities I have in my sorority; we have sisterhoods, exchanges, volunteering, meetings, online workshops, alumnae brunches, a father-daughter dance, a fall family dinner, a Mother’s Day brunch, and GADs. And of course I have to block out time for Dawg Saturday’s and Seahawk Sunday’s.
I love to procrastinate. If procrastination were a sport, I would be in the running for first place. In my sorority, we literally have a room for procrastinators that we all spend hours basically doing nothing. Avoiding procrastination in college is excruciatingly hard because you can get distracted anywhere and by anything and justify it. I’m a people watcher, so usually at the library or a coffee shop I’m always looking around studying people rather than math. In the middle of my studying, our GroupMe always blows up asking people if they want to grab coffee or go to the store, and you’ll see me pack up my books and run out of that library like Flash. But I always have to remember I cannot always do those things because I need to finish my Dinosaurs flash cards and I need to study my Latin so that I can graduate and become what I want to be when I grow up into a real adult.
What do I want to be when I grow up? Well I’m sorry to tell all of you but I still will not be on Billboards Top 10, or playing on your favorite radio station. But, hopefully, I will be writing amazing articles for a Newspaper one day that you’ll be reading on Sunday mornings. And even if I change my mind, I still have time. Being 19 years old and in college gives me a lot of time and options. But for now I’m happy with my decision and the sacrifices it took me to get here.
