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December 27, 2008

Teen Talk: Matching a passion to a college

For many teens, college has been looming on our horizons since junior high.

Though we have a vague idea of what we want — brick buildings, vines of ivy, lecture halls of avid learners clicking away at their laptops — most of us aren’t 100 percent sure of what we want to study for the next four years, and eventually do for the rest of our lives.

For my friend Fiona Doherty, a senior at Cherry Valley-Springfield Central School, the search for the right school was overwhelming, but ultimately successful after realizing her passion and working hard to get into her perfect college program.

Fiona began visiting colleges at the end of her junior year.

“I realized that college was pretty imminent,” she said. “It’s daunting to find a school that fits you. It means you have to start thinking about that inevitable question: What am I going to do with my life?”

But, with the help of a supportive family, Fiona was ready for the challenge. Before her junior year of high school, Fiona avoided the college question at all costs. She wasn’t interested in selecting a college based on the extracurriculars she has excelled at in high school. She has co-captained the varsity soccer team, started for a Tri-Valley League Champion basketball team and set school records for running events in track and field. But she has never felt that sports are her true calling.

“I’d like to play for intramural teams in college,” Fiona told me, “and I’ll always be an active person. But I don’t have a desire to seriously pursue competitive sports past high school.”

She is also a talented musician _ she’s participated in All-County band and New York State School Music Associationfestivals as a soloist every year since she began playing the flute in fourth grade. But music isn’t her true passion, either.

Though she’s a voracious reader, she doesn’t want to major in literature. She loves to travel, but she isn’t interested in any field that could take her around the world.

Fiona always thought she would enter college as an undecided major, get a solid liberal arts education and choose what she wanted to do as a junior in college.

But to her surprise, she stumbled across her passion during high school, in the kitchen. “I started to cook at the end of my junior year,” she said, “and (last) summer, I got more serious about it. In our culture of fast food and TV meals, it’s sometimes hard to make good nutritional choices. The more I cooked, the more aware I became of nutrition and its role in our lifestyles.”

She didn’t discover her passion a moment too soon.

“I started visiting colleges at the end of junior year, looking mostly at state schools. When I decided that I wanted to concentrate in nutrition, I started looking at schools in the Northeast with good nutrition programs, which really narrowed my options,” she said, thinking back on the process with a sigh. “I visited (the State University College at Albany,) which I liked, and (the State University at Geneseo,) which I didn’t.” She also visited the University of Rochester, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Cornell University, which she fell in love with.

“(Cornell’s) campus is so busy and exciting in the context of this funky college town: Ithaca.” One of Cornell’s public sectors, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, offers a variety of nutritional programs, including international nutrition. “It was perfect,” Fiona exclaimed.

“A major where I could explore my love of travel and nutrition at the same time.” Cornell was her first choice.

The problem was that Fiona only realized how badly she wanted to go to Cornell when she visited the campus in September. She had to raise her SAT scores, take two SAT subject tests and send in her application by Nov. 1 for early decision.

I watched her bury her nose in the fattest SAT books for two months straight and scribble college essay ideas in the margins of her notebooks during English class. In a matter of weeks, she had improved her SAT score by almost 200 points, earned impressive scores on the Math I and Literature subject tests and sent an application to her first-choice school.

She also sent out applications to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and SUNY Albany and had an interview at the University of Rochester. Then was the notorious “waiting game.”

“I tried not to set my heart on Cornell and I knew that I would be happy wherever I ended up, but no other school in the area had the perfect program.” On Dec. 11, Fiona got her acceptance letter from Cornell University.

After the frightening process of choosing a career, the hectic search for a school and the lengthy applications, she was bound for the school of her dreams. The next step is simply going.

Maggie Millner is a senior at Cherry Valley- Springfi eld Central School.

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