UMich Essays

A few years ago I discovered an unexpected love. My entire live has been devoid of any musical inclination. I just got by in mandatory choir classes, and avoided taking band class, remembering my failures at piano and recorder. Then one day I decided to try out guitar lessons and see if this would be any different. I immediately found a new, gratifying hobby in playing the guitar. As I progressed through practicing and lessons, I become more and more aware of how my current guitar, my mom’s thirty year old Ibanez, while functional, was bringing down the my ability to enjoy guitar. I played with my teacher’s guitar and noticed the differences in more ways then one. The notes sounded sweeter and my fingers found them easier. I knew I had to get a new guitar, but my parent’s did not find it very pressing. They told me that if I wanted a new guitar, I would have to pay for it. Thus began one of my first lessons in the financial world.

My first and most obvious problem was that I did not have a job. I set out to find a job appropriate for young teen to achieve my goal. After hearing about soccer refereeing, I was immediately intrigued. Having played soccer all my life, and knowing that referees make good money, I signed up to take the certification classes. After 24 hours of tedious classes, I passed my test and was on my way towards a new guitar. The negative part about being a referee is that you do not get paid until the end of the season, in bulk. I decided to find another job that pays off more readily.

After some thinking and a few phone calls, I ended up with two odd jobs. The first was working at a local gym that had just been bought out by another gym. My duties included cleaning, stocking, and rearrangement of machinery, amongst other things. It was tedious work, but well worth it for the monetary reward. My second job was doing lawn work for my new next door neighbors. We agreed on a weekly fee, and every weekend I would cut, edge, and weed-whack their lawn. This was in addition to my own yard which I had to toil over as well, without payment. So the weeks went on, cutting two lawns for the price of one, but I pressed on knowing it would be worth it in the end.

Slowly but surely, the money accumulated. At the end of the soccer season my referee check came in, and in combination with the profits from my other jobs, I had enough to purchase my new guitar. All my life I have been a slow to spend money according to how my parents raised me, but after this process, I feel I really learned the value of a dollar. Another lesson I learned was that anything worth buying is worth earning, and that hard work pays off. When confronted with a similar situation in the future, which will most certainly happen, I will approach it differently. I have learned that even better than working for money, is having money work for you. I realized that saving money was fruitless in comparison to investing it, and have gained impressive returns on my money earned since then by investing into mutual funds. Through these profits alone I would have been able to afford the guitar and more, without laboring.

There are a few reasons that led me to choose pre-law and psychology as my areas of interest. First, I love the amount of diversity in law. There is a plethora of interesting fields under law that makes it so intriguing. The freedom to study these different facets of law has drawn me into it. As a person of many interests, I find the fact that I can study multiple aspects of law alluring. The nature of law provides me ways to develop myself intellectually and personally. In addition to that, it’s interesting in a professional sense that I can work in several areas.

Secondly, I discovered a passion for psychology this past summer while enrolled for a summer course of AP Psychology at Northwestern University. While taking this course I discovered that when studying for a test, it did not seem like tedious work that had to be done. I found myself genuinely enjoying what I was reading, something not often encountered in my studies. I found the intricacies of the human psyche captivating, resulting in a thirst to study psychology. Learning about the processes and inner workings of the human mind and body was something that I found pleasure in, compelling me to voraciously read through the material.