Israel, Here I Come

  My last semester of High school and most of the summer I thought I knew what I was going to do; I was going to major in Biochemistry and minor in German.  Sounds great, right? But immediately upon entering Arlington Hall on the UTA campus for orientation I suddenly decided that I in fact had no clue what I was going to major in or do with my life.  All the planning and research I had done all went down the toilet at that instant.  I nervously walked up to one of the tables in the Lobby.

"Hello, may I help you?"

"Yes ma'm, I would like to change my major."

"And what would that be?"

"Undeclared."

Right then I felt an immense amount of weight lift off my shoulders, but yet at the same time the most unsettling feeling came over me.  I'm the girl with the plan who knows exactly what she wants to do, and here I was filling out a form to change my major to undeclared.  I was scared, and at many times wanted to go back to the table and tell the lady I had changed my mind, that I still wanted to do Biochemistry.  Something is better than nothing, I tried to tell myself.  While having all these mixed emotions I couldn't help but feel some sort of self-empowerment.  I was going to college and I could now make my own decisions...even though I now had no idea what those were.

This past semester I took a few classes that I could see myself seriously considering for a major.  I took Introduction to Classical Mythology, Western Civilization, Introduction to Anthropology and two Government classes (those of which I am not interested in but are required.  Immediately I fell in love with Classics and within a few months I knew I had to take more classes in it.  Western Civ.  I loved, but I knew that I didn't really want to major in history and Intro. to Anthropology I absolutely hated.  It was so boring -talking about evolution and how we came from monkeys was repulsive to me.  My Uncle, I later found out majored in History and Anthropology.  The idea of majoring in Anthropology sounded so disgusting to me, and I told him  that after my first semester I was never taking another Anthropology class.

Never say never.

Just a few weeks ago during class registration I found myself sitting in front of my computer not signing up for one Anthropology classes, but two.  Just a month or so before the semester had ended and I was in one of my rants about how stupid Anthropology is my Uncle very patiently and logically pointed out that sometimes what you major in will not necessarily have anything to do with your career.  That the degree is really just a stepping stone to something else.  I took this to heart and thought it through...I knew that if I could bare through all the Anthropology classes I would love what I would be able to do with the degree.  So, this coming Spring semester I am taking Principles of Archaeology and a class on migration.  Just in a matter of months I have gone from absolutely loathing Anthropology to seriously considering it for my major.

But I needed to be sure, so I started to look up things I could do outside of school to reassure myself that this was something I actually what I wanted to do.  The school Anthropology site was a dead end but on another site I found a link to an archaeological website that funded digs around the world.  After about an hour or so I decided that the dig in Israel in the Jezreel valley suited my taste perfectly.  After seriously discussing it with my parents (they were skeptical about me going to flying to Israel by myself) they gave me the green light to mail the application.
       That was about a week ago.  So this morning while I was waiting for my dearest Uncle to come by and jump start my car I checked my email and to my delight I received an email saying I was accepted into the program.  So now I am counting down the days until I arrive in Israel...185 to be exact!