The Student Perspective: Meet Shinah

Speakers: Shinah

Shinah: I'm an 11th grader. I came to the United States when I was 10 years old from Uganda.

Shinah: Adjusting to life here in the U.S was pretty difficult for me because of the curriculum changes and all the different things that I was experiencing all at once. I was a pretty extroverted child growing up, so I was super open to talking to people. I was really... I was really... stubborn. But when I came to the United States, for some reason that all went away and I started becoming more introverted. So talking to teachers or counselors about, like, career help or classes I should be taking, or really just any questions that I might have had, was pretty difficult for me because I was super shy. So when I discovered CareerVillage, I was so surprised that this was there for me, like it's free, and I'm able to use it any time that I might have any questions.

Shinah: I was on the fence between taking AP Statistics or AP Calculus. But I decided to send in my questions, and I put my question [on CareerVillage], whether or not I should take AP Statistics or AP Calculus, and I talked about how I want to go into the medical field and all that, and the responses that I was getting were from doctors and nurses and people in the medical field who are telling me that I should decide to take AP Calculus because it's going to be more beneficial later on in college when I do have to take calculus, which is a kind of harder calculus. So, it's better for me to get the basics before I get to college. I'm saving money, and I'm getting a prep course in in high school, before I get to college calculus. So that was that was definitely very helpful.

Shinah: Sometimes it's difficult when you ask a teacher about, like a question about, you know, like being a doctor or an engineer or something like that because you would get a completely different response from the teacher than you would an actual engineer or an actual doctor. So, it's amazing to get responses from people in that in that field that specific, career field career field So, it's just an amazing website and I'm so grateful to have found it when I did because it's definitely helped me a lot.