Now, three years later, my dreams of the Serengeti are finally becoming reality. This fall– in roughly 60-some days–I will travel to Kenya to study wildlife ecology with the School of Field Studies at their Kilimanjaro Bush Camp. Half way through the semester I’ll be transferred to the Moyo Hill Site in Tanzania. I’m a sophomore at Penn State University, in the Schreyer Honors College. I wanted to double major in Anthropology, and Community and Environmental Development. I want to be an explorer and a conservationist; an ethnographer and environmentalist. I want to travel for National Geographic with a PhD under my belt and a khaki safari hat on my head.

When Jane Goodall was my age, she and her mother were embarking on their ground breaking journey to camp out in the Africa wilderness to study the Gombe chimps that lived their. Mireya Mayor was an NFL cheerleader (which I, mostly likely, will never be) and applying for a Fulbright Scholarship. Margaret Mead was studying anthropology at Barnard, soon to set out  for field work in Polynesia. I can’t dream of ranking my name among theirs now, but maybe one day. After all, this is where I begin.