Amanda is a junior at NAU and a modern language major (focusing on French and Chinese). She is one of 69 students in the AFFCF scholarship program. For the Spring 2021 and Fall 2021 semesters, she will be studying at Université Savoie-Mont-Blanc in France. She shares her thoughts in her own words:
My goal in life is to try multiple things I am passionate about, so I am content with what I did during my lifetime. I want to live a full life of experiences so I can tell my future children that it is possible to follow your dreams and it’s okay if your original plans take you in another direction. I want to live a life where I can provide my future family a ground of stability and fill their lives with love and support, something that people like me who aged out of the system were unfortunately not always guaranteed.
I want to provide my family a simple life where I can give them advice and be looked up to as a role model. One way I knew I could achieve this goal was to personally obtain a higher education. As an upperclassman at a Northern Arizona University, I realized it is hard to decide what you want to do in life coming straight out of high school, or to know what direction you want to take because there is a lack of warning and preparation to becoming an adult. Though, I knew these obstacles were something I wanted to experience in college, to – in a sense – buy myself time to build my identity and gain some knowledge on how the world works.
Life Lessons
The biggest thing I have learned so far is that money is not the solution to living a happy life. Growing up you always think that if I were rich my life would be so much different until I realized now that I was just poor in experiences. Which over time, setting goals to have more experiences has made my life more fruitful because though it is nice to have money, it is better to spend your time on things you enjoy. At the end of the day, you can always make more money, but you cannot buy more time, so it is best to spend it how you want to before it runs out.
I still don’t know what my desired occupation is. For now, I want to focus on my education and study something that I find of interest where job opportunities are a result of using the skills I obtained from what I enjoyed learning about. This mindset has been a large motivating factor in my chosen major and minor modern languages, which is the study of widely used languages and cultures.
Building Opportunities
To this day, I have learned some Chinese, Spanish, and will soon be fluent in French. Learning new languages has opened new avenues and conversations with international students where I get to learn about their lives and cultures from their standpoint. Using this drive of learning something I am interested in has inadvertently expanded my horizons and opened new opportunities. I never would have guessed a few years ago that I would be studying abroad in France during a pandemic to continue my studies.
I see gaining a higher education not only as a motivating factor for good job opportunities but also as a personal motif and legacy I am accomplishing to one day share with my kin as a future parent and mentor. My goals are not complicated or impossible to achieve which makes it comforting that I can dedicate my time and effort toward them.
Invest in Brighter Futures
By making a foster care tax credit donation to the Arizona Friends of Foster Children Foundation, you are investing in better futures for young women and men who have aged out of foster care. Even better, you can get a dollar-for-dollar credit on your Arizona state taxes, up to $500 for individuals and up to $1,000 for couples. Please consider donating today.