It’s funny — I never was a super detailed ‘future planner’ growing up. When asked ‘what do you want to be,’ my stock response was (and still is) simply to be happy. I knew what I liked — books, gardening, music — and what I didn’t — running, math, SOMETHING. Shorter term planning for club / organization events was something I was very good at and something that continues to serve me well, but I didn’t start looking at colleges seriously until late in my junior year of high school. Contrary to many of my peers, who seemed to have a solid idea of what their lives would look like, content in shaping and being shaped by their jobs, continued hobbies, and significant others (often in keeping with standard lines of ‘middle class’ development), I had no conception of what my endgame was. Having worked in food and customer service, I was confident in my ability to eke out a living in our modern world and felt ok with not knowing necessarily where I was going. I had my media, my friends, and my family — an enormously privileged position to be coming from, and one I suspect I still don’t fully appreciate — so I was happy moving forward without a clear destination in sight, confident it would eventually reveal itself. I loved Oberlin on paper and in person, both for its traditional academics and the amount of music, so I felt confident in coming here even if I wasn’t quite sure where the path would lead.
When I got to Oberlin, I thought I would become an English major; it seemed to fit well enough, given that I loved reading, but upon browsing the course catalogue nothing really jumped out at me. Instead, what caught my eye was Intro to Queer Theory and Music History 101 — I’ve written at length about these two courses and how they shaped my experience here at Oberlin, so I’ll spare you the details (and encourage you to read my earlier blog… bwahaha…) but TL;DR I’m now a Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies & Musicology double major focusing on contemporary media studies. My winter terms (again, see previous blog posts), exco courses (see previous parenthetical), and faculty mentors have been instrumental in helping me find these focus points, and over the course of my two years here I’ve come to realize that I want to stay in this world of academia. I love researching, reading, and writing; having the ability to communicate ideas in forums about media I already enjoy thinking on is fantastic. To that end, I have actually become something of a future planner; when I’m bored, I find myself thinking over a future plan involving honors projects next year, working for a year (or two) in the world, then coming back to grad school. I have a list of places I’d like to study at, a document filled with ideas for future projects ranging from a study of cities in video games to the power of nostalgia in advertising, and a fledgling publication list on the Historical Games Network. At the risk of self-aggrandization, I’m going to the American Musicology Conference next week, am speaking at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in February, and am submitting an abstract to the North American Conference for Video Game Music (side note: we really gotta figure out better acronyms than AMS, IASPM, and NACVGM…). I’ve gotten both freedom to explore my own interests and support to pursue the avenues I’m taking those interests in; I’m excited to see what the future holds, and actually enjoying planning for it now that I’ve found something I want to do in life.
