Mentor Blog Post #2

Over the spring break, I was extremely grateful to be able to catch up with work, rest, and personal life matters.  One aspect of my break that I was really excited for was the fact that my brother was coming home to visit for a week.  I was especially excited for this because seeing as he is my mentor, I would be able to ask him questions and receive feedback face-to-face instead of just through the phone.  On the night that I knew his train would be coming in, I told my mom that I would drive down to pick him up so that he and I could have time to catch up, just the two of us, which can sometimes prove to be difficult when you have a few siblings.

After I picked him up from the train station, we were taking the hour-long drive home and started talking about very light-hearted matters.  He asked me how my sophomore year at Wheaton was in comparison to my freshman year and I gave him the generic, “Oh yeah it’s getting better, but college is hard,” response to which I asked him how everything was in St. Louis and he told me about how his chemistry job was going along.  After we were able to get smaller matters out of the way, I started asking him about his plan for the upcoming school year. He answered me saying that he was uncertain about what was to come in the near future, but that he knew he had to figure it out soon. When I heard him respond like this, I was somewhat shocked because I knew my brother had made a plan for post-graduation during his junior year of college.  I knew him to always be the kind of person who sticks to a plan and to not waiver or divert focus.

When I asked him what made him unsure about about this upcoming August, he said that he figured out that he wasn’t sure if he had found anything that he wanted to do for the rest of his life but he didn’t want to feel that he was not going in a specific direction.  He then asked me about what I was planning to do after college. I think that this question has always given me a feeling of uneasiness since I came into college because during my freshman year I realized, I wasn’t quite sure of what I wanted to do. I told him that I still wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do after graduation, to which he responded jokingly, “Well, you’re not getting any younger, so you should figure it out soon.”  We then started talking about what motivated both of us in our daily lives. The hour-drive home took a fast turn from talking about college surroundings to what we felt our personalities and talents could each be individually used for career pursuit.