With finals quickly approaching and the semester drawing to a close, it is only appropriate that I take a moment to step back from all the madness and reflect on this past semester. Perhaps one of the most significant things that I have learned this semester is to stay on top of schoolwork. While I have learned numerous lessons about social adjustment, personal responsibility, and surviving on my own, this lesson about staying on top of assignments and school sticks out to me. This lesson is of particular importance to me due to the GPA requirement for my major; I am technically still in the premajor for Computer and Information Science. In addition to the required prerequisite classes for admission into CIS, I also must have a 3.2 GPA. While earning this GPA is very possible, I learned early on that it would require work.

Obviously, I came into college unsure of what to expect academically. I was certain that the academic rigor would be intensified, but beyond that my guess was a shot in the dark so to speak. Within the first couple weeks, I learned that college would take more effort than I was used to. My epiphany came after the first calculus assignments and quizzes. My grade quickly went from an A down to a C. After seeing my grade plummet, I quickly realized that this was “the real deal”. As a result, I changed my approach to the class and have now raised my grade to a strong B. Although it is not the grade I had wanted going into the class, I am still rather satisfied with my performance, and this experience has taught me a valuable lesson that I would rather learn in my first semester than in my second, third, or fourth year.

November 13, 2018. 8:45 A.M. That is the date to which my internal “I have to make a decision by then” clock is set to. This is the time I schedule my classes for semester 2 of my freshman year. Normally, this sort of thing shouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all, a lot of people have a pretty good idea of what they want/need to schedule for the upcoming semester and to be fair, I do as well. But there’s also more to it than that, so let me break it down.

I have three classes essentially set in stone already: German 1102, CSE 2221 (Software 1), and Physics 1250. Software 1 and Physics 1250 are both prerequisites for my major of computer and information science. German 1102 is the next course in my progression of learning the German language. These three course put me at a total of thirteen credit hours, a relatively light load. I want to add more classes to challenge myself and also ensure that I can stay on a track to graduate in a relatively timely fashion. As such, I am at a crossroads of sort. I have been interested in learning German for some time. I find the history and culture fascinating and have always wanted to be able to travel abroad and speak the language. Accordingly, I have been somewhat interested recently in pursuing a German minor in the hopes of truly mastering the language. However, I also have a desire to work in the intelligence community in the future and while the United States has significant international relations with several German speaking countries, Russian is also in high demand for work in the intelligence community. As I continue to have a mental back and forth about whether I should add a course that would satisfy the German minor requirement or pursue learning Russian, I have weighed the pros and cons of both options…

On the one hand, I already have a fairly strong grasp on the German language, having learned some German before college, and thus German 1101 has not proven to be difficult for me. I could most likely earn a German minor with relative ease, given I put the effort into continuing to learn the language. However, as stated before, German is not nearly as sought after as proficiency in Russian is. Thus, I have given strong consideration to learning Russian. Although this language is inherently more difficult that German, I believe that it would prove to be very beneficial to me in the long run. However, if I were to add Russian to my curriculum, it would not count towards my major requirements as I am already fulfilling my foreign language requirement with German. As such, this addition of Russian to my curriculum could cause me to have to take an extra semester to finish in my degree. And so, with time on my “make a decision by then” clock is running out, I understand that I have to make a decision soon and that I may not be fully satisfied either way.

It’s at times like these, where there is no choice that will satisfy me 100%, that I am reminded that this is part of maturing and taking responsibility. I understand that life is full of these choices, whether it be choosing a job, choosing where to live, or buying a car. As Robert Frost writes, “…Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back,” (“The Road Not Taken”) there is an amount of uncertainty within me as to whether or not I will revisit sometime in the future the path that I do not end up taking. However, as many relatives and friends have told me, college is about discovering who I am as a person and making choices that will satisfy me and that align with my goals in life. Whatever choice is made when the “make a decision by then” clock hits zero, I am sure that I will look back on it years from now with a certain amount of nostalgia and recognize that, while the choice that I did not make had its appeal, the choice that I did in fact end up making would be the one that I had truly wanted to make all along. As some people say, “If you are unsure of what decision to make, flip a coin; in the moment that the coin is in the air, you will know what you want.”

As I stood in my dormitory, I ran over my mental check list one last time: tie, sports coat, tie bar, resumes, pen and paper. I had everything. It was a sunny afternoon in mid September and I was on my way to the career and internship fair at the Ohio Union. When I first heard that there was going to be a career and internship fair at the Union, I experienced a mix of emotions. On the one hand, this was a fantastic networking opportunity and perhaps it was even an opportunity to earn an internship. On the other hand, I was (and at the time of this publication still am) just a freshman. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the professional world in the first couple months of college, it’s that earning an internship as a freshman makes you an anomaly. Regardless, I decided that the worst thing that could happen would be being denied; not the end of the world when you still have three months of college left. Thus, I decided to go down to the Union despite the fact that the odds were stacked against me.

Having done some research beforehand, I had a list of potential employers that I wanted to talk to. The first employer on this list was Battelle. Battelle is a private research institute that does a large amount of cooperative work with the United States government. As I have mentioned before in my “About Me” post, I have a desire to work in cyber security upon graduation from Ohio State. One of the areas that Battelle specializes in is, in fact, cyber security. After speaking with the Battelle representatives, it was clear that Battelle was not currently recruiting freshmen. However, this fact didn’t crush my hopes and dreams; as previously stated, I had come to terms with the fact that the odds of me getting an internship freshman year were long.

After talking with several other government and private agencies, it became apparent that few employers were interested in recruiting freshmen. However, I still consider this experience to have been quite valuable, For one, it took me outside of my comfort zone. Events such as this one have always felt foreign to me. However, I now have some experience in this area. Additionally, I believe that it showed a certain amount of initiative on my part. Perhaps one of these employers will remember me next year as that freshman who came to the job fair despite the long odds. Finally, I believe that this career and internship fair served as a type of “test run” for me. Next year, when the chance of getting an internship are increased, I will have this experience under my belt and I will be able to hone my people and communication skills in an attempt to give myself the best chance possible in the future.