Plans? What plans?

This is intended to be a long-deserved note to my readers about the current status of my life and the plans that I've made, am making, and will make. Ok, that sentence was meant to be really deep or something, and I don't think it was. I also kind of think that I no longer have any readers, since I've only posted a couple of things in the last several months. But if you find yourself reading this, I claim that to be headway.

"Are you graduating in April?" "Yeah." "Oh, wow. What are you going to do?" And my usual response is, "Isn't that a good question?" 'Cause let's face it, it is. In my previous post, I made a couple of references to what I'm doing now to plan for the future. Now, I'm following up.

At the beginning of the semester, I was seriously looking at options of postponing my graduation in order to complete a second BA in Communication Disorders. I've been tentatively planning on going on to complete an MA in Speech Pathology for about a year and a half now, and the headway I've made in that direction has been the completion of my minor in Linguistics, and several of the classes that people have to take to complete a BA in Communication Disorders. I've enjoyed all of it. I say, I've profusely enjoyed my entire college career, which I realize as I reflect back on it, myself now steadily moving toward the end of it. I've loved continuing to study Spanish and all the aspects of it: the grammar, the linguistic properties, the cultures, the art forms, etc. And I've loved being a Spanish Translation major and having my mind opened to what our minds are doing when we begin transferring meaning from one code to another. It's been enchanting to study Linguistics. And so I repeat, my undergraduate career has been enjoyable and has opened my mind in so many ways that I can't count them.

So I've taken a few steps toward an MA in Speech Pathology, although I discovered at the end of last semester that I was quite as close as I had thought I was to beginning it, because there are quite a few pre-requisites that I hadn't sufficiently researched prior to that point. That gave rise to my consideration throughout the two-week semester break of several options. One was to postpone my graduation for a year and complete a second BA in Communication Disorders at BYU. I looked at the requirements, and saw it as plausible to do. (Besides, it would've given me the opportunity to be in a BYU choir again, which I've thoroughly been pleased with being for three years.) Another option was to go ahead and graduate, and then complete an online program for a 2nd BA in Communication Disorders through Utah State. I probably would've continued living in Provo as I did that. And a third option was to just go ahead and apply to MA programs, and complete the pre-requisites before I started on the core of the degree.

After correspondence with professors from a few different schools, I ended up applying to the University of Utah for an MA in Speech Pathology. It was one of the projects I worked on through January; getting the materials sent to them, taking the GRE, and getting professors to write letters of recommendation for me.

Throughout the semester, I've continued receiving e-mails from BYU's career center and from my college and my organizations, and new options have surfaced. After a visit with a representative from MIIS, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, I came to the conclusion that I needed to apply there as well for a Master's Degree. They are home to one of the (if the THE) best translation and interpretation schools in the world. I heard talk of the school here and there in my two years of translation classes at BYU, but didn't feel incredibly inclined to graduate school at those moments. Anyway, I decided to apply. I also found out about opportunities to go teach English in Korea, Japan, or China, and began thinking about that possibility. Additionally, I found out about a job opportunity to be a Team Leader for an organization that does youth leadership conferences for high school and middle school students. As they have international conferences, I immediately became interested.

Anywho, the point of the current rambling is to say that as things now stand, I've finished my application to the University of Utah for an MA in Speech Pathology. I'm a good portion of the way through my application to the Monterey Institute of International Studies for an MA in Translation, and will be done soon. For both of those, I think I'll have a month or so to sit and wait to hear back.

As for the summer, I've applied for the job with Lead-America, and hope to be hired to work a couple of their international Ambassador Abroad programs. If that goes according to my hope, I'll be working for them all through July and will go to Costa Rica for two weeks and Europe for two weeks. And last week, Freedom from Hunger contacted me (and the team from last summer) and gave us the first right of refusal to another internship opportunity this summer. It would be shorter, just 6-8 weeks, and would take place in Chiapas, Mexico. Needless to say, I'm extremely interested. My eventual decision will depend on the time they decide. And personal finances. And other stuff. (That became a less and less definite statement. Oh well.) And I'm also probably going to apply to be an EFY counselor for a few weeks of the summer to fill up some of the other weeks that I don't have planned yet. Ideally, all three of those options will work out. But practically, it's a bit of a long shot that they will. But for now, I just need to wait to hear more from these opportunities.

And who knows, really...I may end up with quite a different future than any of my options predict at the moment. But most likely, come fall, I'll either be back close to home in SLC and attending the U of U, or I'll be in Monterey, CA, Latinizing myself at a pace that I may have never reached before. And hopefully, I'll have had an exciting summer!

I'm looking forward to the rest of this current semester as one of the best that I've had here at BYU academically, and I also plan to continue building friendships and having a really great time.