As much as many of us would like to say otherwise, money is one of the leading extrinsic motivators in most of our lives. Almost every activity we engage in can be tied back to money. We are consumed with thoughts like “how much will the gas cost to get me there”, “how much will it cost to get in”, “should I bring money for food”, and so on. However, one of the biggest money-driven schemes I have been focusing on lately is college. Not necessarily the money spent to go to college, but the money we will make once we graduate with our degree, whatever it may be. So many people base what they choose to study and devote their life to on the income that a specific field will generate. But is $10,000 more a year honestly worth waking up one day and realizing you’ve wasted your life pursuing something that could never truly make you happy?

When I was in fifth grade I thought I had it all figured out. I couldn’t see myself being anything other than a fifth grade teacher. Why? Because I loved my fifth grade teacher. She had this aura of kindness about her, but she was also edgy and sarcastic. She made me love coming to school and even at the age of 11 she wouldn’t let me do anything short of what I was fully capable of. My favorite thing was when I would turn something into her and she would reply with “You’re amazing”, because I always felt like she truly meant it. She always made me feel so empowered and invincible. When people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, all I could really think was that I wanted to be exactly like my fifth grade teacher. I wanted to make kids think they were amazing and invincible. At this point in my life I wasn’t concerned with the money I would be making, or the societal status I would hold. The only thing that concerned me then was my own happiness and the happiness of others. However, as I got older I often heard the saying that teachers are “the most under paid and underappreciated professionals”, and this made my fifth-grade-self begin to think. I really loved shoes, and I also wanted to have a nice house when I got older, so maybe being a teacher wasn’t the best idea. If I didn’t have a lot of money, I wouldn’t be able to have those things, and so how would I be happy?

In middle school I decided it was time to get serious and do my research. I tried to think of things I liked: The first thing that came to mind was writing, so I googled the average salary of a novelist. I got excited when I saw how much some of the big names were making, but upon closer inspection I came to realize that the vast majority of those who choose to write for a living are not J.K Rowling. I was disappointed but still determined to figure my life out at the ripe old age of 12, so I kept brainstorming. I decided I also liked animals. I thought I could probably be a pretty decent veterinarian. I googled the average salary for a vet and was very satisfied by the number I saw, so right then-and-there I decided that my new future profession would be to operate on and take care of animals. A couple of years later, however, my childhood dog, Sally, passed away from cancer. After watching how hard all the vets and surgeons worked to keep her alive just to ultimately let the cancer win was enough to completely turn me off to the whole vet idea. So here I was, a 14-year-old back at the drawing board, still with no clear idea of what I wanted to do when I got older: Imagine that.

As I worked my way into the upper levels of high school I began to get pretty serious with my sports. I began spending long hours outside of practice working on my foot skills in soccer and ball handling in basketball, and suddenly it seemed as if my sports defined me. I had an amazing basketball coach my freshman and sophomore years and she made me love the game and the process of becoming a top notch athlete so much that I could hardly see myself doing anything else. Seeing the way she affected not only me but my teammates as well made me want to do nothing more than be for someone else what she had been for all of us. She made me want to become a coach. The catch? Most high school coaches were teachers, and as I stated earlier, teachers are some of the most underpaid and underappreciated professionals in today’s society. That being said, I tried to think of other ways I could possibly coach without being a teacher, or how I could influence athletes and young people but still make a larger scale income. Going into my junior year I had decided that being a physical therapist would be a good way to maintain all of these outlets. My mom had recommended I look into it, and I knew from being to physical therapy many times myself that it wasn’t a cheap trade. So, based on this decision, I did my research and found some of the top physical therapy schools in the country. Creighton was pretty high up on the list, and pretty close to home. Upon more in-depth venturing I found that Creighton had an articulation agreement with Truman State University (which was significantly cheaper for an undergraduate degree) if you met certain criteria in the Health and Exercise Science Majors, and thus made my decision to attend Truman, where I am now playing soccer and studying Exercise Science.

I made it to Truman in August and I thought I had it all planned and set. Exercise Science major, minor in Psychology, concentration in PT, lots of money ahead of me. However, upon getting to college and being away from all the influences that weighed down on me for the last four years, I began to realize the things I genuinely enjoyed… and would you believe me if I told you my fifth-grade self had it right all along? I didn’t have an English class during my first semester of college and immediately noticed the absence of it. Writing had always been an outlet for me, and my best form of expressing myself. I realized that I had a lot of personal experiences which could possibly benefit me as an educator as well, should I choose to use them. About a month into my first semester I decided that I no longer wanted to be a physical therapist, and I don’t think I ever really wanted to in the first place. I made yet another list of things that I liked, or that “filled my cup” so to speak, and what I came up with was enough to make me decide that I didn’t want to wake up one day in a big house with lots of shoes and lots of money but zero happiness to speak of.

I am still an Exercise Science major because I am interested in body movement and how the body works, but I have changed my concentration and professional interest to Secondary Education. I dropped the whole Psychology thing and added an English minor, but I am still considering bumping that up to a major (you never know, it’s college). I still don’t know what I want to teach, where I’m going to teach, or how I’m going to teach it, but I know that sports and English are what fill my cup and that I ultimately want to have the effect on someone that my fifth-grade-teacher and high school basketball coach had on me. I want to empower people and make them feel invincible. I encourage you to ask yourself, “What fills my cup?” and see if what you’re doing lines up with those things. Are you truly happy? Or do you just go through the motions because once upon a time you thought the money you generated would make you happy? All that glitters is not gold, my friends. And a cup that runneth over is something money can’t buy.