And so it continues

While at Loyola Academy I continued to do well but not anything spectacular. I was mostly in all honors classes and became a B+ student as I started to take school more seriously. During my senior year, college application season started. As I mentioned earlier, I am an only child. Also, both of my parents attended some college in El Salvador but did not have much knowledge of the American collegiate landscape. I never felt my academic advisor was much help but maybe it was just me not knowing what I wanted to do or become. Thus, it was mostly up to me to wade through the whole process.

In El Salvador my dad studied Civil Engineering at El Salvador's national university. During my senior year I took Architectural Design as an elective. As an internal compromise in wanting to follow in my dad's footsteps and wanting to do what I wanted, I decided to look at Architectural Engineering. This initial want of doing both concentrations is one of the earliest signs of my penchant for wanting to do too much and not settling on one specific major/career. You will see this play out as I detail my life's path. So after some research I found out that Kansas State at the time was the one of the if not the only school that had Architectural Engineering. However, as the name suggests it was mostly engineering. After some more thought I decided to only apply to the one school I guess I was destined to go to, the University of Illinois. I am a very tribal person and since I was little I have had an interest in U of I and felt that as an Illinoisian I would be lucky to go to the flagship state school that happens to be one of the best public schools in the country. So, during my senior year I only applied to U of I and it was for civil engineering. However, one weekend as my friends and I visited our friend's girlfriend, I wrote a letter on loose leaf ruled paper to the office of admissions saying that I wanted to change my application to Architecture, it was what I liked more and allowed for a more broad education. A few months later, Fall of 2001, I began studying architecture at the U.

Towards the end of my freshman year, I was in love with everything U of I had to offer. I felt constrained by a major like architecture that did not give me many electives and courses to choose from. So, I decided to switch to Political Science at the end of freshman year. To catch up with my PoliSci classmates I took two summer classes at Truman College back home in Chicago. Spring semester sophmore year I studied abroad in Germany with IES. When I came back and was planning for my junior year I realized that because of credits I earned for Spanish language proficiency and summer courses, that I could graduate in three years if I took extra classes in the fall and spring of my junior year. I decided to do this and graduated after three years in May of 2004 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.