I’ve always admired those people who can pinpoint the exact moment they first became interested in something: an actor who saw “Hamlet” and just knew he had to act. A director who first saw “Star Wars” and just knew she had to direct. I admire them because I don’t exactly know when my interests take hold, either because the moments are so fleeting or so mired in the shrouded mists of time. Most of the time, they’re just silly instances in my past where I can first remember them.
Take my writing, for example. The earliest I can remember writing anything was in first grade, when my story about two cats discovering a flower won a Young Author’s award. And I’ve been writing on and off ever since.
As for history, my grandmother, my mother, and I took a trip to St. Augustine when I was six or so. I don’t remember a whole heck of a lot, sadly. But what has stuck with me was how upset I was that we didn’t see the two Spanish forts, the Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas. What six-year-old girl remembers being cheated out of visiting two old forts? It’s a nerd grudge!
Technology, though, is another story. On my first trip to Boston, where I was maybe nine or ten, our tour guide pointed out MIT and said that was where many astronauts had come from. I distinctly remember thinking, “I want to be an astronaut. So that’s where I have to go to college.” And from fourth to ninth grade, that was all I wanted. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
But then I got to high school. My grades, particularly my math and science grades, began to fall. So I gave up that dream because I thought I sucked at math, and from then on I’ve drifted down career paths with nothing as definitive as “I will go to MIT and I will be an astronaut”. It’s depressing and disappointing at the same time.
When I got to college, I told a friend (a math major) that story. He said, “Maybe it’s not that you’re bad at math; maybe you just had bad teachers.” The truth is, I may be slow to solve math problems harder than 11 x 9 (and boy does Mom, a math person, love teasing me about that), I’m not horrible in math. I wonder, if I applied myself, if I’d be working for NASA instead of contemplating popular culture in modern America.
The problem with having multiple interests and multiple things you’re “good” at is you never know which thing to ultimately pursue. Society seems to place more emphasis on choosing one skill over another, but in an era of convergence, I think it’s time to bring as many talents as we can forward, fling everything we can at the nearest wall, see what results from the mix, and build from there. Let’s see the MIT nerds do that. In space.
