Addie Woltil

My first win from before I reached level 200 and the platinum division (seriously someone needed to take that game away from me)

I am a nerd.

Not in the stereotypical “get shoved in a locker way” or even in the “getting 100s on all my tests” smart way, but through my interests. If you had asked me two years ago—and bear in mind, this is embarrassing to admit—I would’ve told you my favorite thing to do in my free time would be to play GeoGuessr. 

For those who don’t know, which is 99% of the normal human population, GeoGuessr is a geography-based game where you are placed in a random place across the globe and have to guess which country it is using only the context and evidence from your surroundings. Sounds fun, right? What would be more embarrassing than admitting this was my hobby would be admitting that I PAID three dollars a month to play this very education-based game.

I can’t pinpoint exactly where the interest stemmed from, but for a year, I learned the inner workings of the game and almost every country on Earth; I think when I tested it, I knew 175 off of the top of my head. If you asked me now, in fact, I could name every country in Europe and South America and almost every country in Asia and Africa.

At a certain point, I was able to identify which country I was in from only a few seconds of looking around. I recognized languages, street signs, and even the color of the dirt, all factored into my guess, all within a few seconds. Even though I haven’t played in almost a year, I can still recognize Irish road lines, Romanian architecture, and Finnish street signs because that’s how often I played the game.

To this day, I have a world map from the ’60s hung on my wall simply because I find it interesting to look at. In some ways, I am ashamed to say I had that much free time on my hands, but simultaneously, I know way more about the world than the average American, and it also helps in trivia if you need to know which country was established in 2011 (South Sudan).

As much as part of me despises those nerdy interests I had and still have, I think they largely made up everything of who I was and were and are beneficial (seriously, someone ask me to name some countries) to what I want to do as a career in the future. 

I think in some way or another, I will always be ashamed of my interests no matter how normal they are, but despite how embarrassing they can be to admit, I really think they’ve helped me decide what I want to do with my life. And, as a bonus for my geography interests, I know way too much about dirt.