Decision Today Impact Tomorrow

September 2018

This month, as the academic year has finally begun, we asked our writers to reflect on how the decisions they have made in the past have impacted their lives, and how those they make today will impact their futures.

Embracing change

Kaitlyn Marks
MSMU Class of 2021

Coming to the realization that my path has shifted has been one of the most trying and challenging periods in my life. I have recently made the decision to transfer from Mount St. Mary’s University, and although there are many reasons for this choice, perhaps the clearest reason is that I cannot grow as much as I need to at the Mount. After tumultuous issues with scheduling, difficulties with administration, and a host of other factors, I was left confused, upset, and most of all, fearful. What could my future hold? Along with most of my friends, I like to have a plan. I like to know where I am going and how to get there. But sometimes, life throws curves at you. Sometimes, we grow into people who need new things, people and places. Sometimes, we figure out that to become who we are, to follow God’s plan for us, we must accept the whirling periods of change that shake up our lives but leave us better off in the long run.

I came into college thinking I would stay at the same place for four years before moving on to the next chapter. My freshman year was a good one. I absolutely have no regrets coming to this beautiful place and meeting such amazing people, especially the friends who were willing to go on midnight hikes with me, study until all hours of the night for tough exams, and be there for both celebrations and challenges. Throughout the course of my freshman year, I changed immensely. I grew to be much more confident in myself, and I embraced my passions particularly for writing. Writing for The Emmitsburg News-Journal was one of the highlights of my freshman year, and I will miss it beyond words.

At the Mount, I became much more outgoing and craved to be involved. While this is a good thing, it also made me crave things that aren’t offered at the Mount. In regards to my English classes, the professors at the Mount (both in the English department and in other departments across the University) are outstanding. They are kind, brilliant, and willing to work individually with you to help you achieve both in and out of the classroom. Academically, I am hoping to find more variety in the courses offered, and also to pursue English classes more focused on different aspects of writing.

As my freshman year came to a close, I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to become the best writer for myself. I want classes that will teach me how to fight for my dreams, and how to be successful in any path I end up on. This summer, I spent a week volunteering with the most amazing organization called PALS. This organization hosts week-long summer camps for young adults with Down Syndrome and their peers. Volunteering at PALS encouraged me to be bold in the pursuit of my dreams, to seek out spaces and places where I can be my authentic self and discover what I love about the world. This simultaneously introduced me to another world I might be interested in majoring in and exploring.

While I haven’t made the concrete decision yet for where I’ll be transferring, I am hoping to add a second major focused on human services, family studies, and nonprofit leadership. The opportunity to study and immerse myself in both of my passions is one that would be completely invaluable for my future. Aside from helping me with future career aspirations, this path will allow me to grow into the person I am meant to be.

During the decision process, there was the question of returning to the Mount for the fall or not. I’ll be honest. I was so stressed and fearful about the future. Knowing that I need to go somewhere else, but not being set in stone on a path yet is frightening. I have the most supportive family and friends, though, who believed in the choice I was making and encouraged me to open myself up to opportunities as they arise. Ultimately, since one of my classes was cancelled and my schedule could not really be fixed in a way that would benefit me or help me grow academically or personally, I made the choice to not return to the Mount this fall, and transfer for the spring semester. Thankfully this has opened up opportunities in its own way.

I was hired at a local bakery near my home that I really enjoy. I absolutely love working at the bakery and can’t imagine working anywhere else now that I’ve started. Being home for this semester will give me the chance to visit my internship from my senior year of high school, and more importantly visit those in that same internship who changed my life for the better. On a similar note, I will be able to become more involved with PALS as an organization and to stay connected with the campers I became close friends with. This time of change will provide me with an opportunity to focus on growing my own blog, one of my passions and something that constantly pushes me to learn and adapt, and discovering where I want to take it in the future. Growth is all around, and the choices I am making right now are all geared towards helping me embrace the present and solidify my future.

I want to say a quick thank you to the Emmitsburg News-Journal and its wonderful staff for welcoming me into this community and fostering so much growth in me and within my writing. I hope I can still be connected to this paper in the future—it's really a special organization, town, and community. If any of my friends from the Mount read this, thank you for being who you are and helping me to find myself last year. I think for a while, I had lost the spark of joy that makes me who I am, and as soon as I started to be myself on the Mount’s campus, I found it again. To my professors, thank you for being the most amazing. I learned so much from you and will be staying in touch! Here’s to new chapters, being patient, and accepting our paths and the changes that accompany them.

If you would like to keep reading my work and following my story, please visit my blog at www.thecuriouslemon.com

Read other articles by Kaitlyn Marks

Decisions make me

Morgan Rooney
MSMU Class of 2020

Every decision we make through our lives contributes to our future. We learn, experience, and grow. Some decisions seem easy, and some we put off for ages because we can’t make up our mind about what’s best for us.

The difficult part about making decisions, is that we are often afraid of how it will affect our future. Nobody wants to make things more difficult for themselves later. Nobody wants to feel the pain of regret, or unhappiness because what they thought they wanted didn’t turn to be what they really wanted at all.

I struggle to make decisions just as much as everyone else in the world. I would even say that making the wrong decision is a fear of mine. Opportunities come and go, but I don’t know which ones to take, and which ones to let pass me by. I only do my best to try to create a future that will make me happiest.

When we are young, we "know" what we want to be. It is usually a career that is quite difficult (sometimes nearly impossible) to achieve. When we get to high school and have to begin thinking about what we’d like to study or what other paths we may take, we become a bit more realistic. When I was 12, I was so sure of becoming a doctor but as I reached high school, I knew that I just wasn’t cut out for medical school. The career sounded interesting and fulfilling, but chemistry and biology just weren’t areas of study that I had any interest in. That dream had died out (with good reason).

Senior year of high school, I began applying to different colleges, which was a difficult decision in and of itself. I applied to six different universities, three being in my home state of Texas, and three elsewhere. I was about to begin my studies, but I still had no idea of my future career or what I wanted to study in college. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be stationary. I wanted to be able to relocate, internationally if I could. It was a dream of mine (and still is). Because of that, I decided to take my first years as a young adult to the east coast. It would turn out to be just a small taste of what it would be like to move away from home.

Like many others, I didn’t go into college knowing exactly what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. After spending my first year as an International Studies major, I decided that I wanted to be studying communication. Communication would take my love of writing and creativity, and bring it into real world situations. Even when writing a journalistic article, you use your creativity to portray the topic you are writing about, with the hope that the person on the other end will take interest. I have my own sense of control (to a certain extent) as well. A piece of writing doesn’t have to be written in a specific or particular way. Everything you write has a taste of your own voice in it, which is very appealing to me. I want to incorporate my career with my passions for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t soon later that I had come to conclusion that my dream job was to become an author. Of course, we all need a plan B in addition to our dream job, as our dream job is often farfetched and more difficult to achieve. You don’t just decide one day that you are going to quit everything to become a pop star. You must take baby steps to reach your goals. The most important one of mine is to always make time to write. If I don’t spend time writing in my free time, I will never come close to my goal. I can’t just "follow" my dream; I must live it.

I do think it’s important to be realistic. You can’t dive headfirst into just any body of water without testing its depth first. You could get lucky, but chances are that you won’t be successful the first time. I know that I won’t become an author overnight, just as no one has become a musician or athlete over night. It takes time and dedication to get the results you desire.

One of the best (if not the best) decisions I’ve made in my college career so far was applying as a writer for the Four Years at the Mount section of this paper. I feel lucky every time I write an article knowing that someone else in the world is taking their time to read my thoughts. I feel like I’m constantly making progress. My growing understanding of the structure and organization of a newspaper is just a step into what I hope to learn as a Communication major to help boost me into my career in just a few short years.

It’s happened to me many times before that I’ve thought something bad happened, but it had more positive effects than negative. An example I use often is the time I was in seventh grade and didn’t get a commendable score on my state reading test (by one point), resulting in me having to take an additional semester of reading instead of beginning at the basic level of Spanish. Although I was left disappointed, if I hadn’t taken that reading class, I never would have met my best friend, who sat across the table from me. If I hadn’t had to take reading, I would have taken Spanish and probably never would have taken French in high school. If I never took French in high school, I likely wouldn’t be working towards a French Studies major and wouldn’t have spent the summer studying abroad in Europe. The chain goes on and on. Today, I would gladly take the disappointment of having to take a reading class in seventh grade than missing out on the amazing experiences I’ve had with my knowledge and experience with the French language and with my best friend. The same thing goes for decisions, if you feel like you made a poor decision long ago, remember that decisions that are bad on the surface may not be so bad after all.

I won’t end up exactly where I think I want to be, but I know it will be exactly where I’m supposed to be. Despite my fear of making the wrong decisions, I have the overwhelming feeling that everything will be okay in the long run. Life is a chain of events, dependent on what came previously. It is out of my control, but that’s okay.

Read other articles by Morgan Rooney

Here’s the plan: there is no plan

Shea Rowell
MSMU Class of 2019

As I begin my last year of college, I am forced to answer the question every soon-to-be-graduate must face: what are you going to do after you graduate? These well-wishers are only curious to see how I—and all of the others in my situation—are going to make the last four years of work, studying, and tuition payments worth their while. They are looking, I assume, for a very specific answer. Some will be attending graduate school, others joining volunteer corps, most taking their first steps into the workforce, preferably in a job that relates somehow to their degrees.

Having a plan, specific goals, and a destination in mind is important when going through college. However, if I have learned anything about life in my four years here, it is that the world likes to throw curveballs. Even the best-laid plans of a 22-year-old college student, believe it or not, guarantee nothing in the end. The finest efforts and the most thorough preparation cannot, and indeed should not, narrow one’s life into only one path. The best paths, I have found, are the ones we stumble upon somewhat accidentally.

I am not advocating aimless wandering or laziness of any sort—in fact, quite the opposite. Living life with an open-minded perspective doesn’t lead to apathy, but adventure. One of the main reasons I chose Mount St. Mary’s University three years ago was that the Mount understands the importance of developing a person in his or her fullness, building the intellectual, social, emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing of each student, instead of treating each like a commodity whose only value is its economic contribution. Such programs exist, and students cannot stray far from their chosen paths: setting and achieving goals is paramount, and speed and efficiency are vital. At the Mount, unlike many schools my peers have found themselves attending, the ultimate challenge is not to earn the highest GPA or to achieve prestigious postgraduate career placement (although the Mount excels at this, too!), but to become the best version of yourself.

This is, and has always been, my personal goal throughout college, and this perspective impacts each decision I make. When I chose my majors –English and music—I decided to follow my heart. I chose two majors, neither of which have a direct career path ahead of them. Nevertheless, I have found great fulfillment and growth through each. In my English classes, we study the fine art of communication, the mechanics of writing, and, most importantly, the common experiences of humanity. We read the stories of those whose lives are nothing like our own, whose thoughts stretch the boundaries of our own minds, and draw us out of the limitations of our own experiences. We discuss, and often disagree, about the significance of details in each text, and learn to appreciate the perspectives of others, even if they conflict with our own. We learn about human history through the intimate lens of a human writer, and inevitably imagine where we belong in the narrative.

In music classes, I have struggled to identify the components of sonatas and fugues, learned the favorite techniques of Mozart and Beethoven and Stravinsky, memorized common chord progressions and the notes in an E natural minor scale. Believe me when I say that music theory is complicated and challenges the mind to analyze on paper what was meant to be heard, not seen. But despite all the difficult memorization, complex analysis, and carefully-constructed musical timelines, the most fruitful musical experience for me has been performing.

At the Mount, I play in the Wind Ensemble, I take private lessons with a professional instructor, and, whenever possible, I play with regional ensembles in Frederick. These experiences have taught me, more than anything, accountability. In private lessons, I am the only member of the Mount’s "trumpet studio." Therefore, I have no one with whom to compete, no one to keep me accountable for putting in practice hours outside of class. I have to be my own source of motivation. Occasionally, I have failed to put forth the effort necessary to progress. But these failures, as well as the successes, have taught me that if I want to succeed I have to fight for it—for myself. In the ensemble setting, I have learned accountability because there are others depending on me, as I depend on others, to produce the musical product we aim for. Each member, especially in a group as small as ours, is vitally important. If I don’t put forth the effort required to perform well, I insult the efforts of my classmates, and ultimately let them down.

There are many other college decisions that will impact my life, even if I don’t yet know exactly how. As a student worker at the Mount’s Career Center, I have learned how to represent myself and the school in a professional manner, and have met wonderful mentors who will guide me as I enter the workforce. The Mount has given me ample opportunity to practice leadership, as a section leader in the Wind Ensemble, the president of Mount Music Society, the Editor-in-Chief of Moorings Liberal Arts Journal, and even as the Managing Editor of this newspaper! If I continue, as I have endeavored to do for the past three years, to use these opportunities to make a better person of myself – a better writer, a better leader, a better friend – I am sure I will find myself on the right path, even if I cannot see it yet.

My goal, then, for my senior year, is to make the most of everything that comes my way, and to take the opportunities that will help me to improve myself. Sorry to disappoint, but these choices are not aimed at any specific career or post-graduate plan. With my faith to guide me, and a whole lot of work ahead of me, I look forward to seeing how each element of my past converges into a present and a future. In the meantime, all I can do is my best.

Read other articles by Shea Rowell

Back to…

Sarah Muir
MSMU Class of 2018

Crayons, pencils, animal print folders, highlighters and pens in more hues than would be considered helpful, all lend to the smell and experience of office supply stores. For me, such places are full of potential productivity: a mirage of organization. I always liked "back-to-school" vibes. It meant a new start. Every year, about this time, my mom and I would excitedly look through my book list to see what there was to look forward to in my classes and get all excited for those courses I was going to take and activities I was going to participate in.

Not this year.

I have no book lists, I have no course schedules; no need for superfluous highlighters, frilly notebooks, extra post-it notes, or five-category binders that will end up being half the size it started out by the end of the semester. It’s a very odd and different feeling: a bit hollow and a bit off-kilter to see back-to-school commercials and know that this September, which usually came with the change I am used to and subconsciously expecting, will not come to reality.

However, there will be a big change. It will be an introduction into a series of events that I always knew waited for me but had no idea what it would feel like until I finally got there. It is like one half of me knows that everything is different now that I have graduated, yet the other half of me was barely paying attention and is gearing up for the fresh start of non-existent classes. Last week, for instance, I get one of these automatic mass emails from the Mount Bookstore with the subject line, "See what books your professor picked for your semester!" I instantly caught myself trying to remember the courses I had signed up for last semester and if I needed to do anything to prepare for them before school started. Then I remembered that there are no classes, or summer homework, or reading lists (outside of personal ones). I have no term papers or tests or quizzes awaiting my return.

Currently, I have just finished my engagement as a Production Editor Assistant at Wolters Kluwer in Baltimore as a part of their Summer Hire program and have been applying in the last several weeks with reckless abandon to most any job that pertains to whatever skills I have accumulated over the years. I have entered into uncertain waters and am filled with equal parts excitement and apprehension. Excitement, because anything can happen and whatever lies ahead will either change me or add to me in some way; apprehension for the same reasons.

Last month, I gave rising seniors--as well as anyone who would take it--life advice. It was a plethora of fortune-cookie, easier-said-than-done pieces- the intent of which was to make life easier. There is something I didn’t mention, and in hindsight I should have. That is life after. So this is a bit more advice about life after college.

You may have everything worked out, a position, a future and a ten-year plan (which I can tell you right now, won’t go exactly how you have planned it to go). Or you may feel like Dorothy in a whirling tornado ride of applications and resumes and interviews, unsure of when it will stop, or where you will land when it does. This is a time when you may feel as though your peers are on granite while you are shifting on sand and shale. One, you are not alone. Everybody goes through this. It is not uncommon or unconquerable. Two, apply for any position you are qualified for, even if you think there is someone out there who is much more qualified; you’re probably right, but if you don’t apply, the answer will always be no and no matter how good someone else’s resume looks, that doesn’t always mean they are competent. Three, always ask questions during interviews--good standbys are "What does a career at [insert organization name] look like?" and "Why did you choose [insert organization name]?" Do not rely only on your resume (seems obvious, but worth saying) and have an example ready for all your skills and experiences because you don’t want to seem as though you just added them because it sounded good (even if you did).

Finally, there will always be times where you will wish yourself ahead. When you’re a little kid you look up to adults, you can’t wait to be them. They are these all-seeing giants that seem to know everything: the meaning of a word, perhaps, or how plants grow, and how volcanos erupt. I’m sure most everyone can attest that there is a period of life where you are so ready to be an adult, because when you’re a grown up you can do whatever you want, whenever it suits, and nobody can tell you otherwise because you’re a grown up. In the eyes of a child, there is no higher power. When you do grow older you realize that you know more things, perhaps the meaning of a word or about flowers and volcanoes, but you don’t know everything, and you’re not prepared for everything either. It is alright to think of the better times ahead; after this loan, this move, this change, this year; but don’t wish the time you have now away. No matter its difficulties and anxieties, there is still joy to be found--a sweetness to cultivate, even if it’s only in the small things. Nothing else in the world can take the place of happiness.

My present and future, for the moment, are uncertain and the only aspect that I can control is how I spend the time I have. I may not be going back to school, but I am still learning and being taught. After this article is written and sent, I am going back to that pool of uncertain depths that is filled with applications and resumes and job searches, feeling both nervous and entirely hopeful of what is to come.

Read other articles by Sarah Muir

Read Past Editions of Four Years at the Mount