When I was in the 9th grade, I had just moved from Waukee to Norwalk and was starting high school in a brand new place where I knew no one. I overcompensated for my lack of connections by being an overzealously involved high school student, playing a sport each season, getting involved in clubs and student government and taking as many classes as Norwalk High School offered. I grew up in the countryside and spent my summers traveling to Wisconsin with my grandparents and working with the horses on our small farm. My world was smaller than I imagine yours to be, given that we didn’t really have the Internet at that time and my wildest travel ambitions were to spend time in Western Europe.
I went to college at Northwestern University in Chicago, where my world expanded bit by bit. I was every bit as active as I had been, and I would often schedule my days in 30-minute increments to squeeze the most out of my time, rollerblading back and forth across campus and to my job at an outdoor store. I settled on a double major in Political Science and International Studies but also insisted on continuing French (which I had taken throughout high school) plus Italian and Spanish.
