This week I will begin my third year teaching high school Spanish, but the path to get here wasn’t what you may think.

I started college as a Biology major with a plan to become an Occupational Therapist, and as a young, not-so-driven freshman in college, I arranged my schedule so that I would only have classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. (Don’t judge me!)

One of the first classes I signed up for was a Spanish class, and I was pretty excited about it after our first meeting. Our teacher seemed great, the other students were nice, and I knew it would be one of my easier classes that semester.

On Tuesday, the day after classes started, I slept in and went to the Union to pick up some Chick-fil-A around lunchtime. When I was leaving the Union to walk back to my dorm and take a nap, a girl stopped me and said “Hey, you’re in my Spanish class! Are you not going today?!” I quickly replied with full certainty, “No, that class only meets Monday/Wednesday/Friday!” She corrected me and pulled up the schedule on her phone. I hadn’t realized that the Spanish class met every single day! So I did the mature thing and dropped the class. I couldn’t take a class that messed up my perfect M/W/F schedule!

That summer, I went on my first mission trip to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to build a house in memory of a family friend who had passed away the year before. I will talk more about the trip in the future, but it completely changed my life forever. I fell in love with the people of Honduras, and I knew that I would be back one day.

I spoke enough Spanish on that trip to make basic conversation, order “pollo frito,” and find the nearest “baño.” But I wanted to be able to have deeper conversations and ask more questions. I wanted to build lasting relationships with the families I had met, and I wanted to help other people on the trip do the same.

I transferred schools that same summer as an undeclared major because I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I was pretty sure that I wanted to minor in Spanish. When I started making my schedule for sophomore year, I signed up for a Spanish class. (Guess what… they all met every single day. I checked.) My second semester, I changed my major to pre-nursing (still didn’t feel great about it, but it was the most appealing major at the time). I took another Spanish class in the spring semester, and another that summer. I started to love school because I loved my classes. I loved my professors. They challenged me to push myself, but they also genuinely believed in me and encouraged me when I did well.

When it was time for me to start applying to nursing schools, I went to my advising appointment with my list of schools where I wanted to apply. I can’t remember if the list was incomplete, or if I just wasn’t super enthusiastic about our conversation, but my nursing advisor stopped me in the middle of our meeting. She curiously looked at me and said, “Mary Katherine, I don’t think you want to be a nurse.” And right at that moment I felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted off my shoulders. “I don’t think so either,” I told her, “but what am I supposed to do?!”

She suggested that I choose a major based on the classes I had enjoyed the most in college, and I think we both knew it was going to be Spanish. I left her office and immediately sprinted across campus to change my major to Spanish. I still had no idea what I was going to do for a career, but I knew that I wanted to continue studying Spanish. I knew that being bilingual would open a lot of doors and allow me to build relationships with my friends in Honduras no matter what I ended up doing as a career.

When people started asking me if I was interested in teaching, I quickly let them know that it would never happen. (Never say never.) But being a teacher is a calling, and I couldn’t escape it no matter how hard I tried.