Babel Scattered

What Has Made Me Who I Am Does Not Have to Be What I Become   I’m a high school senior from a small town in Central Washington. Since I was thirteen years old, I’ve known exactly what I want to do “when I grew up”: I want to become a professor of linguistics at a major research university. I want to research and write papers and teach. Because I have had this answer ready for so long, people started to ask me what I want to specialize in. I’d say that I wasn’t sure, but perhaps an indigenous language family in Central America, because I already spoke Spanish and had studied the culture and politics of the region. Then it struck me: what has made me who I am does not have to be what I become. This was a shocking, indeed liberating idea for me. It seemed so obvious, that I was going to college to learn new things and have new experiences, and yet it seemed contrary to everything I had learned. Suddenly, this simple idea permeated every aspect of my life. It became a mantr