I'm an recent high school graduate. I come here because, despite high test scores, I don't know what I want to do with my life, and I feel like being here might help me.
You don't have to decide what to do with your life you know. In fact, you kinda can't. Sure, you might decide something now, but then 20-year-old you could just as easily say "Well, fuck it. I'm going to drive across the country and marry her."
Suppose you had 2 years, what would you want to do? What would you want to have done and set yourself up to do?
Hmm. I have a hard time naming specifics. I enjoy math when I understand it, but I have the hardest time in Calculus of any of my classes. I was near the best in my class in Biology and Chemistry but I didn't really enjoy them- if I did I probably would have gone to the larger UC than the smaller liberal arts school I'm going to attend. Everything else was a mixed bag. I enjoy writing when it's on something I'm interested about, I dislike it when it's rote, but what I'm interested in is usually fleeting. That tends to apply to motivation too. I can get aroused for a lot of work in one case, and in another similar case I can't be bothered.
I guess my favorite piece of work in the last two years was a project in regular economics. We were divided into groups and ordered to create a business model in report style. We created Fatoline.
Fatoline was dreamed up in response to an unsustainable America. This unsustainability is rooted in the suburban commute lifestyle- people drive everywhere, consuming vast amounts of gasoline and gaining weight. The Fatoline company has two public fronts, its liposuction service and its gasoline service. We take the fatty liposuctioned tissue, put it through some huge centrifuges, introduce some modified lipases (modified through science magic) and heat and boom, we have gasoline, which is sold through our other front. This keeps the automobiles running, the people skinny, and keeps the suburban structure of the U.S. stable. Only now, instead of nasty foreign oil coming in, we have the wholesome, local fat-conversion company keeping our lifestyle afloat.
Unfortunately, after crunching the numbers, it turned out that for this system to work, each person would have to produce some obscene amount of fat each year, somewhere in the thousands or ten thousands. No matter though. Once we figure out how to get people to be able to get that big, the dream is definitely alive.
I guess I liked the project because it involved a little bit of everything.
Suppose you had 2 years, what would you want to do? What would you want to have done and set yourself up to do?