For a good deal of my life I’d been announcing, practically bragging, to my family and peers that I was going to be an engineer. So, you can probably imagine how difficult it was for me to ask my parents if they could see me working in another career.

As much as I wanted a job in engineering, the higher level math requirements became too much to bear. For reasons that still elude me to this day, math just seemed pointless to me now. I used to love math for its patterns and predictability. Now the algorithms didn’t seem to touch on anything in the real-world anymore. Eventually I had to drop out of the class and forfeit the path of engineering altogether.

My academic journey was stuck at a fork in the road. I had to uncover new talents and new inspiration for a new calling for myself. When I didn’t have papers to write or tests to panic over, I pondered and reflected upon who I am, what I have done up to this point, and what do I want to do for the rest of my life. I knew that discovering my true vocation was a matter that deserved careful deliberation. However, I also knew that my time for pondering was running out.

I dreaded the worst when I informed my parents newfound struggles. When I came across difficulty with a class, I would always stay the course by working through the problem or find a way around it. This was the first time I had to abandon such an important waypoint. Oddly enough, they were very open-minded and were supportive about this change in potential professions. This was not to say that they were happy about me leaving engineering; this just meant that they would support me wherever my path would lead.

I tried to put my dilemma into the perspective of “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” (Confucius) Then came the query of what do I like to do and can I make a stable career out of it? I thought about my dilemma long and hard, but I needed inspiration to move me in the right direction.

One night while I was contemplating my career decision, my Mom suggested helpfully, “Maybe you can be like the people at KAP?” I thought about it. It was true that KAP’s career was focused around helping people, but how was that career classified? I did some digging on the matter and discovered that the organizers of KAP are classified as a social-work program, a vocation that I had been doing for fun for years with the Boy Scouts, National Honors Society, and the Beta Club.

Very soon after my discovery, I declared myself as a Social Work major at WKU and signed up for the necessary courses for the third year. Fortunately for me, I had already dispensed with most of the major’s prerequisites and Gen Ed requirements so I was able to jump right in to the major’s introductory courses unchallenged.

Though I was taking a new academic and career path, I did not regret my time in the engineering courses that I had taken in High School. I may not be putting my education from them to everyday use for my new profession, but I still value my time in the engineering magnet. The program gave me motivation to get out of bed and seize the day. It gave me hope that every school day I was going to wake up and learn something that would make a difference in somebody’s life. This was also a time that I could get an idea on what parts of engineering I was good at. I had new skills that could aid me in a domestic setting-such as the time when I repaired my dying TV with the skills I learned from my electronics course. I could also say that my high school years were anything but ordinary. After all, how many can say they made a human-sized canoe out of cardboard and duct tape?