The Christian Rationalist

When I first heard about the concept of a Career Fair in my freshman year at Caltech, I half-joked to my friends, “I don’t want a career!” I came to college to learn math and science, and was quite honestly disgusted with classmates who would choose their course loads, student groups, or volunteer opportunities for the sole purpose of looking good on a resume.

This didn’t mean that I resisted growing up or planning ahead. I suspected I would want to go to graduate school, so I spent my first two summers doing research in my two favorite fields: math and chemistry. After all, this looked good on a grad school application for precisely the right reason: Experience doing research would prove to both myself and graduate admissions committees that I would thrive there.

During the rest of the year, I tried to learn all the things. I took the more difficult options for physics and biology requirements in addition to numerous advanced math and chemistry classes as a freshman and sophomore. I even sat in on the first few weeks of the main major-specific classes for astronomy and biology my sophomore year before the workload of organic chemistry lab caught up to me.