Nostalgia and Excitement

I can’t believe where my life has taken me in the last four years. Looking back, college was an incredible journey, and it only makes sense that I’d be doing something I had never expected to do. In a nutshell, when I began at Smith College in Northampton, MA., I was planning on being a psychology major and toying with the idea of being pre-med. But, apparently life's not that simple.

In my first semester, I thought I’d take African Philosophy for a “fun” class. As it turned out, the advisor my school had arbitrarily chosen for me happened to be Catharine Newbury, an expert on Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As I gushed about my philosophy class and lamented my lack of ideas about what to do with my upcoming summer, Catharine told me if I wanted to, I could apply for funding to take an indigenous African language through an intense program called SCALI. I did it, ended up taking Swahili and loving it, and during the next year I decided to self-design my major in African Studies, all the while staying pre-med. I also applied for and won the David L. Boren Fellowship, which allowed me to study abroad for one year at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. After that, I figured I’d go to med school right after college, someday becoming a Doctor Without Borders.

As if this wasn’t already an erratic enough college experience, my life got turned around again this past October during my senior year. I was running down the stairs to check my mail in the campus center when I slammed into a woman carrying several folders. After apologizing to her, I learned she was a representative from Teach For America. Several conversations, an application, and various forms later, here I am, about to embark on a two-year teaching career.

Basically, TFA is an organization that subscribes to the belief that where someone is born should not determine their educational and life opportunities. They recognize that there is a large achievement gap in this country, and corps members, as they're called, work to close it. I'm going to positively affect change in the lives of my students by holding them up to higher standards than they can imagine, hopefully pushing them to pass an AP exam or something like that. I'm already excited to see what me and my students are capable of.

Thus far, this is what being accepted to TFA has been like:

• January: Received acceptance to the 2008 Los Angeles corps
• March: Passed the General Science CSET, a science-specific California teaching exam
• April: Took the CBEST, a California basic skills exam for all teachers
• May: Graduated from Smith and started prep reading for my summer training institute

It hasn’t been too stressful up until this point, but I know that institute will be insane. Institute is what TFA provides for its teachers. Mine lasts from June 29-August 2, and that, in conjunction with the pre-reading I am doing, will serve as the entirety of my training for becoming an excellent high school science teacher. Most likely I will be teaching at a low-income school in Los Angeles, and although I grew up in southern California, I know that it will be a very challenging endeavor to work there. Well, now you know a bit more about what it took for me to get to this point. I think in my next post I’ll write more about what Teach For America means in general and to me personally. Like, why did I choose this for myself when I could have just simply (ha ha) gone to medical school? Stay tuned!