I was not a big history guy until college. Part of the reason was my teachers. For two years in middle school and then one year in high school, I had a teacher that taught little to nothing over the course of the entire school year. The ethos among my friend group and what I had picked up by high school was that STEM was my priority in life. I took Advanced Placement STEM courses in science and math and computer science, but avoided history. I wanted to be a computer engineer and I loved (and still love) computers and computing As a student with a supportive home and family life, I excelled in school. The one subject I struggled with was reading and writing in English. I felt like my writing did not convey what was in my head, but that started to change senior year. My AP Literature teacher pushed me harder than other teachers had. She had high expectations and the work forced me to think and write in new ways that were deeply challenging.
When I applied for colleges, she helped me write my personal statement essays. I applied as a computer science or computer engineering major. However, when I arrived in college, a number of factors pushed me away from STEM and into history. First, I worked for a couple of summers full time at a web consulting firm. I wrote code that calculated Amazon Web Services billing, and what I found was that sitting at a computer for 40 hours a week did not do wonders for my mind, body or spirit. When that feeling continued into the computer science classes in college, I started to look elsewhere. Under the harsh environment of the right wing of evangelical higher education, I was really depressed and struggled to understand the cultural context of the college. However, through sociology, intercultural programs and history courses, I began to develop a critical toolkit. I began to read, a lot. Through my Foundations of History class I was introduced (for the first time) to bibliographies. Suddenly, knowledge and historical writing was not just a static narrative but an area of discourse of debate.