Indecision and uncertainty have led me here: abused, mistreated, barely holding myself afloat amid the morning deluge of hyphenated imperatives-- “triple-Venti half-caf three-pump non-fat no-whip white-chocolate-mocha”. I’m twenty-three and freshly bearing a BS in Neuroscience (specialty: Neuropsychopharmacology) as a patron takes a moment to explain the side-effects of excessive caffeine consumption on the brain.
I’m told that that the purgatorial space between undergraduate and everything else is at least as educational as those four years that got me here, and I’m inclined to agree. Out of school for just barely a school year, I’ve been a barista slinging java at five a.m.; a singing gondolier piloting a forty-foot authentic Venetian wedding gondola, witness to countless engagement proposals; a Direct Support Provider to an autistic child seeking rank advancement in the Boy Scouts of America. I’ve also obsessed over economics, politics, and gossip of all kinds, which is to say that I’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time.
I’m bored with stalling, and my fear of commitment has become abhorrent to me. I stand prepared to make movements to meet my potential, be it medical school, dental school, or something heretofore unimagined. The only thing standing in my way is a set of particularly ungenerous student loans, and so I say, unabashedly, that I deserve this award because I’ve spent a year underperforming, and my ambition demands it. I thirst for success, to strut my stuff, to ACHIEVE, for Pete’s sake, because your latte is a terribly small accomplishment, isn’t it?
