Family Influences

From the time I was a little kid to just a few years ago, I was constantly around the presence of science either through the time I spent with my dad while he was building houses or the time I spent reading about cars and eventually racing them. A large part of my motivation to pursue my Mechanical Engineering degree was from the influence of people in my family, mainly my Step-brother and Step-dad and racing my car. It wasn’t until I started college and lost most of my time being at home and hanging out with my brother and racing my car that I started to lose interest in my ME degree and realizing that it wasn’t something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Even though I had already completed 3 years of my degree, I decided to change it to something that I really liked and could see myself doing for the rest of my life and that was getting a degree in Japanese and Japanese culture and so last semester I changed my major from ME to Japanese (I’m a senior now and surprisingly graduating on time this year).

At first glance it is almost like I started out as a ‘Blank Slate’ and what was written onto me were the ideas, views and expectations of my family and friends from the time I was little to pretty much the present me. This would be a pretty good example of the ‘Blank Slate’ idea until the sudden change in my way of thinking as soon as I spent a majority of my time away from those influences. In my opinion, this would be a pretty good example that the idea of a ‘Blank Slate’ and that our ideas and views are ‘written’ onto us from when we are children is a concept that isn’t really true. People may grow up around certain influences their entire life but that does not mean that they will have those ideas and views when they are an adult.