Charity L

I’ve dedicated my life to helping others. When I think about my future and what I want to do, it involves giving to people in some shape or another. For the longest time, I wanted to go into the medical field. I wanted to heal the sick and take care of those that were hurt. As I got older, that dream and my purpose changed.

I get my inspiration from my grandma. She was a pastor when I was a kid and I saw her connecting with her community, helping those around her, and giving hope to those who didn’t have any. She has a kind heart and will do anything to take care of those around her. I saw how happy she was and how happy those around her were and I wanted the same for myself. I see the terrible things that happen in the world and it breaks my heart. I want to use my privileges to give back. In school, I excelled in science and math. I was a gifted student and the content made sense for me. Experiments tickled my ADHD brain and gave me something to think and work on. The adults around me seemed impressed that I was good at science so I thought that my life had to revolve around it. When we would write essays about our future careers, I would choose a doctor of some sort. I wanted to be an OBGYN, a nurse, and a pharmacist. The reasons for choosing those careers always revolved around helping others.

I started off as pre-pharm major thinking about getting into the PharmD program at UGA and talking with my advisor on my course path to make sure I get into the program and graduate on time. It was stressful, to say the least. In my anthropology class, I read about the different subfields of anthropology: linguistics, archeology, biological, and linguistic. I was learning languages in my free time and had watched a couple of videos so linguistic anthropology piqued my interest. I read that they record languages from different cultures to help preserve them or to do research on how languages and that culture connect. It was everything I could hope for. I would help many communities, learn about so many cultures, and do what I love most other than sleeping: learning. I would constantly be learning, absorbing, and connecting with other people. I would also help communities preserve their dying languages so their culture doesn’t die without record. So I switch my major to anthropology and linguistics and I’ve never felt better.