Higher education is scary right now. I feel this is an inoffensive statement. Most of my family has gone to college, so it seems like the thing that I will do, too. This is not to say that the idea of college holds no appeal to me; it certainly does, just that there is also some generational pressure. However, college is really, really expensive now, not just because of rising tuition rates, but because of the increased cost of living in most college towns across the United States. I would love to be able to escape the place where I live, but it feels like a pipe dream to imagine paying $30,000 a year on top of the cost of living just to get a degree that won't make any money in the future. That brings me to what I want to study. This feels like an impossible question, one that is posed to me at nearly every social gathering that contains adults who don't know how to talk to teenagers. (This is odd, given that all adults have been teenagers once. Should they not feel more comfortable talking to someone they can relate to rather than, say, the elderly, who are going through a much more foreign experience?) I answer the question in a variety of ways, depending on my audience and mood. My favorite answers to "What are you going to do after high school?" are "Sell my body on the streets." <- A classic. Elicits shock and delight among many. "Kill." <- An uncomfortable chuckle usually follows as I make intense eye contact with the questioner. After I tell them my real answer (sociology or ethical philosophy at a state university), I get the ever-predictable "So what would you do with that?" I think I could make an accurate dialogue tree based on this conversation template. If I trained a copy of Mistral on a few occurrences of this conversation I think it could with at least 70% accuracy predict the dialogue between me and the questioner. It's like a Skyrim conversation. They ask me one question, I have three answers to choose from, and then they ask me another question, and I have three more answers. Sometimes I revel in the attention afforded to me by my unusual degree pursuits and sometimes I want to peel my skin off! You may be wondering about the image on the left of this text. It is my facial expression whenever someone asks me "What are you going to do after High School?"
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