I get it now

Twenty years ago this December, I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Spanish. Twenty years ago, it didn't seem like a great career move. The number of people who asked me, "What do you do with a degree in Spanish?" [Answer: Speak Spanish and hope someone hires you to do something.]

In high school, I'd actually kicked around becoming an architect. But when it was decision making time, I chose to go to a university with no architecture program and no real idea what I was going to study. You could argue that it came down to a better financial aid package, other reasons. But honestly, I just felt right about attending the other university. 

I kind of fell into Spanish, too. It wasn't really planned. I took 101 and 102. Then 201 and 202. And just kept going. I still don't feel like I'm particularly good at it, and I know at the time I didn't feel super fluent, but I kept at it. Twenty years ago, I never could have predicted how pivotal that seemingly random (or at the very least, not super proactive and determined) decision would be. 

As part of my degree, I did a study abroad, leaving the country for the first time. I look back and can't even imagine the kind of person I would be without that experience. I am humbly grateful for how it expanded me as a disciple of Christ or, for the less religious or non-Christians among us, as a global citizen. It it didn't feel dramatic at the time, but it was the little decision that made a huge impact. (Okay, maybe not little. It was a 4-year degree, which is a pretty big commitment of time and resources. But you know what I mean).

But that's not all. After graduating, I did indeed speak Spanish and find people to hire me to do work that had nothing to do with Spanish. And then, ten years ago in April, I graduated with a Master's degree in Archival Science. Now I am an archivist for a global religion and guess what I specialize in? Records from Latin America. My team meetings are in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, with Spanish as the lingua franca. A significant portion of the records we collect are in Spanish, and I then describe them in both Spanish and English. I've been to 4 Spanish-speaking countries this year, and will likely go to 2 more before the year ends. 

It's not that being able to speak Spanish wasn't useful in the years between degrees. It always came in handy. But here I am, twenty years later, seeing that it wasn't just a handy side skill, while I got on with other work. Not to minimize my master's degree--if I only spoke Spanish, I'd be pretty useless. But, 10 and 20 years later, I can see there was a purpose to the path I was inspired to take, even though at the time, it felt pretty purposeless. And I hope in 30 and 40 years, I look back and see even more how purposeful those decisions and future decisions have been.