Sarah Bingler

On Choosing Her Major and Gaining Experience:
Well, history was definitely one of the things I excelled in high school and not even excelled, just really enjoyed. I had AP History classes and I really liked it. I didn't have a lot of Art classes but I always enjoyed it, like another facet of history, I think and I am very visual person. I thought at first I would maybe go to school for some sort of Performing Arts, Theater, something like that, so I applied to a lot of Fine Art Schools. I applied to Carnegie Mellon I applied to NYU, Northwestern. Pitt was kind of like my back up school almost because I didn't apply here for Theater at all, it was kind of like if nothing else works out, but half way through my second semester of senior year in high school I realized I didn't want to do that the rest of my life and I did so well in school, but I thought it would almost be a waste to forget the academic part of myself. I was going to major in Speech Pathology and I did that for two semesters and hated it and went back and looked at all the courses that I took and what I liked and what I did the best in and what classes I never missed or never wanted to miss and that was history and art history.

Actually I was going to minor in history but I have so many credits that it just made sense to double major. I was in my second my semester last year. My roommate actually had the same major as I did and we were going to class and I was looking at this homework the first week thinking, "I don't want to do this now, how am I going to want to do this the rest of the semester?" I had Modern Art which was going to be one of my last gen eds and that was the only class I wanted to do the work for and I was like, you know, this is what I love this and why can't I do this? Why can't I do something that I really, really like? I guess I was always like I decided not to do theater, I was like alright, I have to do something I am going to make money in. I'll be successful and I'll have career opportunities and I always thought of Historians as teachers and that kind of stuff and I don't know if I want to be a teacher but it is just what I like I guess.

I have an internship this fall at the Heinz Center. There are a lot of things I could do at the Heinz Center. There are a bunch of different departments they have programs for kids. They have archival things. They have exhibitions. There are different facets.

On Advising and Resources:
My advisor is awesome. He is always so accommodating like when I called him or emailed him one morning the last week of classes and I was like, I don't like what I am doing, can we fix this? He said sure and we went through everything. Just anything I needed and really the thoughtful "this is what you need to do" guidance not doing it for me. I always feel like all the decisions I made were mine. They were never forced upon me. Just a great support system. I don't think there is anything at this university that I need and isn't available to me, like easily available. I mean, the resources are phenomenal and the resources that I've been presented with for career opportunities beyond the university are great. It is almost overwhelming to be quite honest. I mean, there is so much out there and we are presented with it and we get the paper work when we are freshman and we get the paper work when are sophomores, we have the Web sites and the emails and its there, its just taking advantage of it.