Sunday, February 21, 2010

What is your passion?

I was 16 when I first came to America through an exchange program. I even took a leave absence from high school because I thought this would be the only chance for me to see what America is like. I stayed in America for college, but I didn’t know what I wanted to become, so I studied Math and Economics because I was told that if I had no passion for anything else, Economics was the best major to find a job.

I studied one year of Calculus and took an intro course in Economics – it was awful. I instantly hated it and stopped caring about supply and demand curves. I got warnings from both professors and the school about losing my scholarship. I was not interested in becoming an investment banker, but I didn’t just want to randomly pick another major like I had picked Economics.

It was a stressful time. I had to find out what I could do and what I might be good at while worrying about my scholarships. The art class I was taking became my most relaxing time of the term. I enjoyed working on my projects no matter how long they took to be what I wanted them to be. So I thought, maybe I could be a studio art major. I went to declare it right away. So there I was, a studio art major student with no art background at all, but I had found my passion, and I was happy.

Three years later, I am about to graduate from college and I am trying to figure out where I will be next year. What I can do with a BA in Art? Will my passion save me again? After Prof. Jodi Sedlock’s lecture about changing her focus from art to biology, I feel like there are a lot of possibilities in the future, and I just need to be patient and continue to make art at the same time. When my new passion comes, I need to be ready to take it on.

2 comments:

  1. I had similar feelings about math and science in high school. From pretty early on (definitely by my junior year), I knew I wanted to go on in music, so I never took any upper-level math classes. Now that I've been working with geeky electronic stuff, I feel like I really shot myself in the foot by getting so focused so early on. Now I've gone full circle and am taking all non-music classes this term and hope to pursue graduate work in both music and art fields.

    Maybe somewhere calculus, economics, and photography overlap and you'll be the person to make sense of that overlap. It seems like a pretty great set of skills to have.

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  2. The quirkier the mix of passions the better. The more obsessed the better. This is what we have observed.

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