Assignment #6 - Haley Noehren - Aggravating and Mitigating Circumstances

I walked into the Lexington courthouse eager to begin my process of exploring the legal field. I entered a courtroom on the third floor, notebook in hand, ready to complete my training sessions for the program TeenCourt. After 5 weeks of training I would be able to prosecute or defend small juvenile cases that came through the system. I was so excited, all my life I wanted to become a lawyer and prosecute criminal cases. By the end of those 5 weeks I wanted nothing more than to leave. After completing the training I realized that there was much more to being a lawyer than meets the eye, and I abandoned that dream. It was an eye opening experience but it left my future empty and cold. I had settled on becoming a lawyer and graduating with a pre-law degree. Now I was left with nothing. My future was an empty and anxiety filled space, as the one thing I thought I was passionate about was gone.

At the same time I was exploring the dismal world of becoming a lawyer, I also was taking two classes at school that I used to fill the void that TeenCourt had led me to create. The first class was AP Psychology which offered an interesting outlook into the human mind that I had never considered before. The second was AP Seminar, which gave me opportunities to do in-depth research in the things that I was interested in. For my Team Multimedia Presentation in AP seminar my group decided to research criminal profiling, something that I had heard of but never really looked into. I chose the psychological lens, exploring the psychology of serial criminals and how criminal profiling was effective at tracking them down. During this time of confusion as my dream of becoming a lawyer fell apart, I began to find something else to become passionate in.

For the first semester of my sophomore year I obsessed over criminal profiling. Between what we were learning in AP Psychology and my research in AP Seminar I couldn't escape it. Back when I was obsessed with becoming a lawyer I was always interested in working with criminals. I wanted to understand what people had done and why they did it. With the introduction of criminal profiling to my life I suddenly found a way to incorporate my desires to explore the criminal mind that didn't involve becoming a lawyer. This critical point in my sophomore year was a turning point in my ideas for the future. Now I was interested in the FBI and criminal profiling work. I wanted to understand the what and why of criminals. I was fascinated and couldn't get enough.

While my main focus of criminal work didn't change, the way that I could achieve my passion did. Now I am interested in FBI/detective work and exploring the mind of criminals. I expressed my shift in passions to my mom, who gave me a stern look of concern. My dad always put emphasis on not completely giving up on the sciences and medical field as a future career, but my mom had always supported me in whatever career I wanted. Her concern startled me, as she warned me that there were a lot of bad people in the world and that I would never want to learn what they had done, let alone profile them as an FBI agent. As I sat, listening to her express her concern and disapproval, I looked her straight in the eyes and told her that I did want to know what these people had done and understand why they had done it. It was this moment of defiance that I realized my passion. It was then and there that I decided my dream would be to work in a psychological unit of the FBI understanding the minds of criminals, and what may have led them to commit crimes.

Everything is subject to change. Like I learned last year, an idea I held for year could be changed in the course of a week. But unlike my ideas about becoming a lawyer, my ideas about becoming an FBI agent carry a sense of excitement and euphoria that no other career path I have considered has brought. Who knows, maybe my passions will change again. But for now I am focused on getting a major in psychology and then one day entering the FBI and applying my skills there in a criminal profiling unit. The chance to understand a criminals mind and their actions presents such an intriguing opportunity that I do not want to pass up. The idea of using that knowledge to piece together crimes is something that I would have never considered a year ago.