Introduction

For as long as I can remember, the things going on in the world around me only made sense when placed in organized, arranged patterns.  Each time a new piece of information was observed and added to my collection of knowledge, it was stored with other facts similar to it.  It was easier to process the objective versus analyzing the subjective.  This tendency began to surface in its simplest form, when, as a toddler, I would climb up onto the shelves in the kitchen and organize the disarray that was my mom’s canned food collection.  Everything works best, in my mind, when it is kept neat and structured.  Growing up, I was never told to clean my room, mainly because my room was kept neater than anyone’s who could have made this request of me.  Actually, quite often I was asked to inspect my sister’s room after she had been told to clean it, to verify that it was clean.

This obsession eventually led me to become a very rational person.  Simple calculations and formulas were always easy for me to understand, whereas writing stories and poems was something I had learned to dread.  To me, it has always been easy to solve a problem if you have an exact, infallible method of getting the answer and, once you have obtained the answer, to verify whether it is correct or not than to analyze the tone in a writer’s voice. No matter how complex the substitution or verification, it was always easier for me to break down the steps of a complicated calculus problem than it was to write the simplest of poems, because I merely had to apply a formula and verify that I had received the right answer. The majority of this perfectionist lifestyle can be attributed to traits I received from my father.  As he works with numbers day in and day out as a banker, I can only assume that his obsession with numbers had a great deal to do with my own.

 After discovering these pieces of information about myself early-on, I knew going into school that the classes I would succeed the most in would be the ones in which I could use numbers and formulas to derive the answers.  I also knew I needed to get away from my hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to really experience life as an independent college student.  As I began taking courses at UW-Madison the fall of my freshman year, I realized that the problems I had been learning about in class could be related to the world around me.  The background knowledge I was gaining could actually show how things worked in the world around me. These problems weren’t necessarily around just to improve my skills in any one subject, they were actual problems faced in professionals in the fields in which I was studying.  From this realization grew my desire to have an impact on the world around me.  Though I was always able to keep my life sustainably neat and organized, humankind has had quite the opposite effect on the world around us, and I hope that my studies are someday able to contribute to the creation of more environmentally friendly possessions and people.

 Being in London has provided me with the opportunity not only to learn about other people and cultures in the world around me, but to observe a different type of world, a different landscape.  The buildings and offices here are so much older and more antique looking; giving the entire city more of a “home-y” feeling to it, even though the population is so much larger.  The small corner coffee shops and cafes often serve homemade food which makes it not only better food, but often a more enjoyable, relaxed atmosphere than the busy, chaotic schedule I am used to encountering during a lunch hour. The history of the city is shown in so many monuments throughout the vicinity, and it is a place people from all over the world come to visit; that makes me realize how lucky I am to have the ability to spend an extended period of time here. The public generally takes the Underground Railroad, bus, or walks, and from this I believe only good can come.  I have high hopes for my time spent in London, as I know things here are so much different from what I am used to.  This change will force me to open my eyes and mind to the things going on around me, and gain a new perspective as I journey off into the world of employment.