Apr 21, 2011

Enamored with engineering

Basically, what I was told coming into college is that you should not declare a major until you’ve taken a few general ed classes and figured out where you fit in; your niche.  Of course, being the ambitious and stubborn 18 year old that I was (and, truth be told, still am…) I didn’t listen and applied to the school as a marketing major at the Hilton School of Business at LMU. 

In the next few weeks I took a trip to MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institution), and quickly became enamored with the oceanic lifestyle that all the men and women of the institution were lucky enough to live.  They spent their mornings out on the ocean collecting samples and scouring the bay, and their afternoons researching the specimens they caught.  What I was particularly fond of, however, were the ROV pilots.  ROVs, or Remote Operated Vehicles, are the mechanical underwater submarine type gadgets that are controlled from the boat via complex remote controls and buttons.  Essentially, the job of the ROV and pilot is to navigate under the water and to collect marine specimen for study and to observe (and record- there are cameras on-board these incredible products of human engineering) the interactions between organisms in the Monterey bay. 

This is when I first discovered my ability to fall into a passionate lust for a particular career path or lifestyle with little basis.  Immediately after I got home from MBARI, I sent LMU an e-mail stating I wanted to enroll in the University as a mechanical engineer so that I could be an ROV pilot, or they weren’t going to have the pleasure of my attendance to their university! I KNEW that I wanted to be an ROV pilot and an engineer, after all.  I heard back a couple of days later, and found out that LMU had acquiesced, sewing the seeds to the destruction of my engineering career.

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