It's Official, I am Coming Back to Pitt

This afternoon I terminated my enrollment for next semester. I did this because staying here is not the best thing for me to do academically. Over the summer, my educational and career goals changed drastically and unfortunately Haifa is not the place for me to achieve them. Don't get me wrong, I love it here. The people are great. The food is tasty. The beach is beautiful. The campus is beautiful. And I'm getting better at speaking Hebrew. But when it comes down to it, I need to be back in Pittsburgh prepping myself for grad school and taking courses that diversify my education. It's great that I'm here learning about the Middle East and Judaism and it was great that I had the opportunity to intern with an Israel organization this summer, but unfortunately I feel like I'm cornering myself in the Jewish community. All my job and personal references are with Jewish organizations and the majority of my classes have some sort of Jewish element to them. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not burned out on Jewish matters, but I need to diversify.

My ultimate goal is to go to grad school and become a policy analyst, researcher, writer, or professor or some combination of them. And recently, becoming a corporate or tax lawyer has become an option as well.

I applied to Haifa at in a time in my life when I was absolutely broken, stressed, and devastated about my shortcomings at Pitt and with Hillel. I thought that going abroad would be the answer, and to an extent it has been. I had a long summer to explore new things, to meet new people, and to figure out what I'm going to do with college. And I think I've figured out everything that I needed to.

I'm a year a wiser from last November, and I'm ready to get rolling on achieving my goals back at Pitt.