This weekend, people across the country will be graduating. I have a few friends who are graduating this weekend. One is finishing business school. Another is getting her long-awaited medical degree, which was delayed by a year because of her cancer diagnosis in 2013. I personally thought undergraduate was long enough. I had little doubt in my mind when I finished my undergraduate work that I would probably never set foot on a campus for additional study ever again.

I think learning is a lot fun when you do it at your own pace, when you don’t have to get graded on some dumb bell curve based on a test you spent weeks of sleepless nights studying for. Some of the best learning I’ve had is during my travels, re-learning all the U.S. history I glossed over through formal schooling, and through books I’ve voluntarily read myself since college. I’ve also learned a lot meeting different people and speaking to different people. I knew unless I was crazy passionate about a certain topic, I’d never do graduate school. So I didn’t.

If I had to turn the clock back, and if I really thought I could do anything this past week, I wondered what my life would have been like if I decided to pursue a social science like sociology or even political science. I’ve always been interested in how people interact in groups, how the dynamics change, and how our societies have been formed based on historical and personal life events. Being an academic isn’t all boring and theoretical as people think it is; many politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, whose book I am reading now, started in academia and are now influencing the entire country, if not the world. I would like to have a bigger influence on something, but what that something is — it’s still unknown. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.