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An orientation session at a college can provide you—a new undergraduate—with a lot of information concerning class registration, building locations, and activities to get involved in within your school and the community outside. At Boston University, this case is true. Yet my major takeaway from the student leaders and college deans did not concern logistics, but more so, a memorable quote that provided me with the perspective I have taken on since I began my freshman year.

Howard Thurman, Boston University’s former dean of Marsh Chapel and preacher on the idea of Common Ground, once said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

As an English Education major, I appreciate literature and short stories, and when words form to create a sentence that resonates with my thoughts, I feel all the more inspired. I sat for a second—or what felt like forever—trying to think about what made me come alive. I don’t think I could fully say back then, but as a rising junior, I will say this: The idea of being an educator makes me come alive.

I love my future students already. I can see Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences at play in the actions and attentiveness of my third graders in Lexington, MA and of my middle-schoolers in Bangkok, Thailand. I can foresee challenges to the profession—how will I make a complicated plot in a novel seem easy to approach? How much time should I put into a vocabulary lesson? How will I design a text that tests each individual student equally? These are issues I must work on as an educator and with due time, I am confident that I will learn how.

Teachers have so much to learn, perhaps plenty more than their students. I am in the middle of my orientation—as a new intern—here at the Center for Education Reform (CER), aware of what makes me come alive and with some issues in mind that I would like to see discussed. Yet I still have so much to learn.

I suppose the big question here is: How does one reform education? I hope to learn about some of the strategies that policy-makers use to push for an issue. I aim to get to know the members of the CER staff and be of assistance to them. I want to learn more about how to research, how to advocate, and how to speak up. I am thankful for the opportunity to be able to intern at the CER. What I will learn here has an impact on my (potential) career and classroom. What a fantastic summer it will be for me to be immersed in a world where I will have the chance to think about news and issues that I care about!

Navraj Narula, CER Intern