Is this Cheating?

Woah, betcha didn't expect to see me here again so soon! (See, that was a joke. Because I am the worst up-dater in the history of up dates. And it has really been a long time. And I am just now updating. Do you get it? Huh? ...I can be funny.)

Some may call this cheating. I call it creative re-uses of my work.

I was told I needed to write an essay thanking the donors of a scholarship I recieved following my time in Germany and this is what I came up with. I think it adequently summarizes my life feelings right now: stress. anxiety. and a whooole lotta time constraints.

I hope you like it. My German advisor was oddly impressed. I honestly feel like I made everything too sugary sweet. Your thoughts?

--No exam question, no essay response will ever be as stressful to a college student than when someone asks, “What are you going to do after you graduate?” The consensus amongst the student population is to respond by elaborating one's extensive plans while paradoxically being as vague as possible. The trouble with this question is it implies the entire purpose of our college careers; literally everything we have been working on up to graduation has been a means to our educational ends, and it is a bit scary to reach the brink and realize that after nearly sixteen years of being a student we truly do not know what will happen. Even being wiser than our former high-school selves, who truly believed that when we go to university to study medicine that we will become doctors, what we have really learned is that we can be certain that nothing after graduation is certain.

If anything, college is the four years in one's life where learning to accept personal faults and strengths is a key development. Above all else, this aspect of learning is highly valuable because knowledge is something that you can always find if you look in the right book, but wisdom comes from knowing yourself. Unfortunately, opportunities to gain personal insight do not arise as often as one would hope during university classes. Not once have I looked up from toxicology text with a revelation about my life goals or purpose. Fortunately, university is not restricted to classes chosen to fulfill a concentration requirement. Quite the contrary, the University of Michigan's Program in the Environment requires that students complete a practical experience. This can be anything as easy as attending the university's field station or as complex as arranging your own internship and self-delegating a research study. The latter, which I chose, allows for a bit of leeway in designing and exploring one's way out into the real world.

As an environmental and German double major, an important part of my practical experience would be to discover an internship where these two fields could converge. A very simple search of possible combination of work in German natural settings helped me discovered the Wald Piraten Camp in Heidelberg, Germany and I almost immediately decided that this camp would be my practical experience. Unlike many of the other options recommended to me, the Wald Piraten camp mixed both natural environments and psychology to improve upon the camp experience for children affected by cancer. Only in Germany could the environment be seen as a tool for psychology and physical healing with cancer patients and personal experience pulled me toward it. It is a pleasant surprise to find out that your dream job does exist in the real world. 

At the time, I was not really sure if I could handle working with kids—yet this was the only job I had seen mix German and environmental psychology. To be completely honest, this was the first job I had seen outside of academia using environmental psychology at all.

 ... (Editor's note: Irrelevant donor-thanking removed)..

As a result I believe I have found a career path that I would like to stay on. Working with the children was an enriching endeavor that I will take with me forever, but possibly I will not have to take it very far. The camp has offered me a position next summer and they are awaiting my answer. To have discovered not only a career path that aligns with my values and intentions but that is also reciprocated by the organization itself is a wonderful feeling. I go into my graduation ceremony now not with a heavy conscious of what I will do after I remove my cap and gown, rather I am looking forward with optimism to a possible job. That was only possible through the expansion of my education at a small summer internship, something I could never have gotten out of a book.--