Advocate: When did you graduate from Mayo High School? 

Snigdha: “2011”

Advocate: What is your favorite memory during your high school years?

“Door 3. I refer to a group of kids my year who, from day one of freshman year, managed to grab D3 as our place for the next 4 years. It’s where we coalesced every morning and during our open hours. We had blanket forts and Free Hug Mondays and baked treats, raced to the cafeteria on days there was Veggie Pizza, hosted giant Super Smash Bros. Brawl filled sleepovers with what seemed to have been chips, pizza and desserts as our only food options. We were a group of anime nerds, video gamers, ice skaters, artists, and the vast majority of us were awkward people in that time of our lives. Having this giant group of 20+ people who accepted each other without condition was one of the most wonderful gifts of my high school career, a support group. This solidarity in friendship was something I did not know in middle school and did not realize was missing from my life until I found it.”

Advocate: What is one thing you would change, if you could, of your high school experience?

Snigdha: “[I would have] freed myself from the stigma of being a nerd in high school. Honestly, I still can’t walk around Mayo High School as an alum without feeling that oppression, and it wastes massive amounts of emotional energy for all of [the students].
If I had just bitten the bullet and spent that $1000 to attend Carnegie Mellon’s Video Game Creation summer program, I would have discovered myself surrounded by the kids lucky enough to have attended the well-funded NJ and California schools, the schools with 2 years of programming courses and 3 levels of mathematics classes beyond Calc BC. These kids weren’t any nerdier than they could become simply because they had those classes available to them, so they seemed to be more passionate – but I know that Mayo High School students would be equally passionate about STEM if those classes were simply available and just an established part of our school systems.

Those kids are making an average of $90,000 on the west coast right now.”

 Advocate: What one tip would you give to Mayo High School students in particular in regards to the future?

Snigdha: “Following your dreams is nice, but facilitating your dreams by first going into the type of major that would get you a stable job is even better. My passion is writing, but my software engineering job and the ability to pay for things opens avenues an English major would not be able to pursue. For example, what I find to be the most surprising: the master’s degree. I was shocked to find out how often my English majors peers discouraged me from pursuing that option. I eventually discovered it is not because English majors don’t want to do it: it’s because they can’t pay for it. Getting accepted into a program isn’t good enough. They could wind up turning down their dream MFA program because the program will not be able to provide enough financial aid to them. They want to prevent adding more debt onto a major that already is unlikely to be lucrative. And when people fail to find jobs that have anything to do with English / music / theater / graphic design / arts / history / many of the types of humanities majors that feed soul but not the body, they are stuck doing a (soul-sucking) job that will take up 40 hours anyway, with little room for career advancement, or working multiple jobs and thus having even less time to actually pursue their passions.

Nobody’s stopping you from minoring or double majoring in what you dream of, and some career paths don’t have a roundabout way to pursue them like writing does. However, unless you’re attending a conservatory-style experience you will not possibly be able to attain in theater or music or dance outside of college, be warned that you can either spend four years discovering yourself and spending the rest of your life discovering how to sustain yourself…or you can invest four years building a solid future and acquire the job that will pay for all your passions and hobbies.

Please, by all means, follow your dreams. But there might be a smarter way to do it. Don’t let following your dreams in college get in the way of following your dreams for life,”.