For most of my freshman year, I seemed to swimming in a seas of uncertainty. The prospect of choosing one particular career path and the right bundle of majors and minors to correlate with that is a daunting task. I spent several months bouncing around ideas of becoming a professor after I graduate, or possibly pursuing a financial track and become a businessman, or even a high school teacher. These ideas were no more than listless attempts to figure out what I was truly interested in. I mostly loaded up my freshman year schedules with General Education courses to avoid having to take major courses for some major that I may or may not have a total interest in. I figured I was talented and enjoyed studies in the social sciences, and filled up my sophomore schedule with a broad array of classes to determine, once and for all, what would typify my college experience.

It wasn’t until I took a class during the fall semester my sophomore year called International Studies 3550: Introduction to Intelligence History, taught by a former employee of the CIA, that I began to recognize my calling. From the point of this recognition through the present day, I believe I have what it takes to pursue a career within either the defense department or the US Intelligence Community within the federal government.

The Science and Engineering Library located on 18th Avenue is renown campus-wide as the go-to building to get some serious studying underway during late-night hours in preparation for an exam the next day. Though I forget the exact day, I knew I had a statistics exam the following day and my whole dorm building seemed to be too full of life to conduct any meaningful memorization. My roommate made my dorm room a less-than-ideal area to study, so I made the walk over to the SEL, claimed some territory in the form of a small table like some sort of 21st century pioneer, and booted up my laptop to review notes.

I had never stayed up past midnight in pursuit of academic achievement at any time throughout high school, and yet, as the clock struck over into the next day, I knew I had joined some elite club of other motivated individuals who would put down the time and effort, whatever whenever necessary, to accomplish their goals. I stayed in the library for five hours straight. I sifted through hundreds of slides of Powerpoint lectures on Carmen. I must have taken the practice exam three times. And wouldn’t you know it? I got an A on my first exam.

During the fall semester of my freshman year, I was a history major. The very first book I had to read for college was assigned to me by Professor Stephanie Shaw for History 2800: An Introduction to Historical Thought, one of the first required courses any history major attending the Ohio State University must pass. It was titled, “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.” Though I am no longer a history major, the lessons that I learned through reading that book have fundamentally changed my perspective on how I look at events that take place in the past.

Just like the present and the future, the past can be changed. History, humankind’s collective understanding of previous events, can be recorded, falsified, and destroyed to achieve the political goals of a person or an influential group. The only authority on what is true or false comes from dedicated people willing to delve deep enough into the surviving artifacts of all kinds to produce what they think is the truth. Defining and re-defining history has always been, and will continue to be, a cat-and-mouse game. This lesson has instilled upon me a healthy level of skepticism to help verify that any historical work I come across both during and after college is faithful as it can be to the truth.