Before I die...

Before I die, I want to live.

I have big plans for my future actually. Beware, it is pretty specific.

After I graduate San Diego State University with my Bachelor's degree in Social Work, Spanish, and History, I will join the workforce.

I won't go back to college for my Master's, sorry Professor Cosio.

I want to work at an office full-time, with great benefits, good pay, and a good retirement plan. I have already made up my mind that I will not get a job right away with the majors that I studied in college - or at least I can use my Spanish in conversation or working with clients. I just have to make money - good pay, good benefits, and move up quickly in the company.

The reason why I want to get just any job is because I need to pay off my student loans, regulate my credit card, repay my amazing mother who supported me my entire life, and save up for future trips.

I'll be stable within the next 1.5-2 years, then I will get married by the age of 25 and move out to live with my future husband. Our honeymoon is at Jeju Island in South Korea.

I want to travel to different places with my fiance, as we love to go to new places, try new foods, go on adventures. I want to go back to my hometown - South Korea, and try all of the street foods that they have to offer. It has been seven years since I have last been to Korea, and I miss it very much. We also want to travel to Europe, Canada, other parts of Southeast Asia such as Thailand and Japan, and go back to my fiance's hometown as well in Panama.

I'll continue working with the company for at least five to ten years, then work at non-profit organizations. I would like to go back and work for what I majored in. I have worked with different groups in the past such as Holocaust survivors/elderly through my internship at Jewish Family Service, and with children (K-12) through my job at Girl Scouts of America. I want to continue working with different population groups such as veterans, survivors of torture, refugees, in order to expand my experience working with different people and build humility.

My ultimate career goal is to work at the United Nations (UN). I would like to work at a department of the UN and continue working there till I'm old and ready to retire.

I will use the entirety of my retirement money, and happily!!! I plan to settle down in the place that I had studied abroad to in my college years - Avila, Spain. A quiet and ancient province in Spain. I would like to live a very quiet life for the remainder of my life.


End Note: It was a great experience to write blog posts as part of my assignment of my RWS class. I see myself continuing to write a blog in the future when I pick up my career goal working at the UN and writing about my experience there.

Aren't We All 3?

According to Annie Murphy Paul's article "Secrets of the Most Successful College Students", there are three types of student learners: surface, strategic, and deep - respectively in that order. Surface learners do as little as they can to get by, strategic learners only care about the grade and not the material, and deep learners leave college with a deep and rich understanding of the material. After reading this beginning portion of the article, I couldn't help but to disagree that students are not classified into these three categories. Students are a little bit of each! Let me talk about myself:

A fifth year at San Diego State University, graduating in May 2019 with a BA in Social Work, Spanish, and History. When I first got admitted into San Diego State University in 2014, I was accepted into the International Business program. In the beginning, there were courses that I took which I could not fathom  at all. My first two years of college, I was just trying to get by and tried my best just to get the "A" because I could not for my life understand MIS or accounting. In this case, you could say I was a surface-level and strategic-level learner. When I had changed my major to Social Work and Spanish, I finally understood what I was learning and took that material to real-life situations. I was doing well with my grades, but there were courses I just had to take to graduate - to get by. And the reality is, is that life happens. I worked multiple jobs all throughout college; balancing out priorities was difficult every time there was a change such as a new semester or a new job or an internship. The truth is - I was not always inspired or tried to understand the entirety of the material that I was learning. It was impossible to. In between four other classes, work, relationships, activities, and other commitments; it was impossible to be the deep-learning student all four (or five) years of college. Yes, students burn out too. There are times we just have to get by and we drop from deep-learner to surface-learner. It's difficult to keep that consistency of deep-learning style.

Above all, I am proud to announce that I am graduating this May, and I consider that one of my greatest successes. Success is not determined by the type of student learner you are. I believe that every student is a little bit of every type of learner: surface, strategic, deep. And I can say from experience that deep-learners are not the only ones who are successful in the world. I believe Annie Murphy Paul's viewpoint in success is a different kind of success. However, I believe that her view of success and how it is measured is not the same success that I envision. I do believe, though, that when we take from what we have learned and apply it to real-world situations, then the education that we have received was not in vain. It was a success.