“The most
important lessons are not necessarily the ones you will learn as part of the
curriculum.” A fresh-faced, wide-eyed fourteen-year-old entering high school
for the first time, I had received this statement as advice. At the time, I was
not sure what it meant, but, four years, later, I’ve found it to be incredibly
truthful. This is my story.
*****
Since I first
learned to talk, people have asked me what I want to be when I grow up. At
five, my answer was “a singer.” After I realized that I am not as great at
singing as I once believed I was, I changed my mind, insisting that I wanted to
be a fashion designer. Eventually, I accepted that this was probably an
unrealistic choice, and now, at seventeen years old, my answer to the
“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”
question is this: Who knows?
What I do know,
however, is what society dictates that I should be, as well as what my friends
and family are encouraging me to be. Having exhibited an interest in science
since my bowl haircut days (a very, very long time ago), I have found that most
people I’ve talked to about this problem – deciding what I want to be when I
grow up – are encouraging me to become a doctor, a scientist, or an engineer.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I am thankful for their
support. I still love science, but over the course of these past four years,
I’ve fallen in love with English, with psychology, and with French. Right now,
I have absolutely no idea what I want to major in, or what I will one day
decide to achieve. The pressure to go to medical school, become a doctor, and
make a six-figure salary looms large. Yet, as I chose which colleges to apply
to, or which majors to consider, what I remembered was this: The most important
lessons are not necessarily the ones we learn as part of the traditional
curriculum.
When I took AP
Biology two years ago, I had underestimated the difficulty of the class.
Following the first test, Mr. Duluk told
us a story in an effort to encourage us. With a passion for art and
drawing, he wanted to pursue a career as an artist, but when guidance put him
into physiology instead of physics, he found himself falling in love with
biology. He knew he would become a doctor. Eventually, however, Mr. Duluk began
to help professors set up labs for the lower level classes, and when his
professors were late, he would go out and begin to teach the class. He loved
it. At that point, he had received the highest MCAT score out of all of the
Providence College pre-med students, and
he had received acceptance letters from some of the most prestigious medical
schools. Though it proved an extremely difficult decision, he evidently chose
to teach.
At the time Mr.
Duluk told us this story, it did not really make a lot of sense to me. Like me,
he has the intelligence to do nearly anything he wants. So why would he choose
to become a teacher over becoming a doctor? Yet, as the year went on, it
quickly became evident to me that he had made the right choice. As you have
walked by his classroom, you might have heard him playing songs about the
pancreas, or see him dancing, arms thrashing wildly, trying to show his
students how a protein’s structure suits its function. His choices reflect the
things he loves.
Energetic, passionate, and enthusiastic,
Mr. Duluk is proof that making choices based on what you love is more important
than making choices for superficial reasons.
Of course,
learning about the function of a plant’s vascular cambium, how to write a strong
argumentative essay, or how to calculate the derivative of an inverse
trigonometric function may all be important. However, I think the most
important lesson I learned in high school was this:
Do what makes you happy. My experience in
Mr. Duluk’s classroom is only one of many similar stories in which I’ve learned
something thanks to an interaction with a teacher or with a classmate. I feel
humbled and happy to have spent my time at North Attleboro High School, and I
am thankful to be surrounded by teachers I respect and admire, friends I will
never forget, and family members who have supported me for the past eighteen
years, and who I know will continue to support me in all of my future
endeavors, whatever they may be. I don’t know where I’ll be ten, or twenty, or
thirty years from now. But I know I’ll figure it out.
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