Who is Nathan Gapper? Part 1

The year was 1999. I was alone, sitting at the desk in my on-campus apartment, wondering about the furture. I had just attended a seminar about the needs in developing Latin America. The speaker was so moving that I found myself questioning my pursuit of medicine. All of the late nights at the library, all of the study sessions, the tests, where had it gotten me? My grades could maybe get me into medical school, but then what? I would have many years more of school before I could actually start helping people. Meanwhile, people like those in Latin America that I had just heard about, would live and die in Third World poverty. But what would my parents think? As a sophomore, there was still time to change majors, but to what? The reason I came to UC San Diego in the first place was because of their excellence in the hard sciences.

As I sat there, I pulled the UCSD course catalog off the book shelf and began looking at the list of majors, page by page, reviewing the brief description of each one. There was only one I was interested in...Urban Studies and Planning. This field of study blended such a unique set of disciplines - economics, history, political science, and even biology! It gave tremendous opportunity to help those who need it most and to shape policy decisions that would impact not only the very people I learned about that night in urban settings in the Third World, but I could impact the built environment in every place where people had gathered to form a city. The next quarter, I started taking classes and and ablolutely loved it! That summer I worked at a camp for inner city children and was moved with compassion for the challenges faced in their urban environment. Two years later I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Urban Studies and Planning.

I often reflect on that fateful night in La Jolla on the UCSD campus, thankful for the decision I made and the vocation that has now come to shape my thinking and worldview so profoundly. I can't help but ponder the many decisions in urban history that have made any given city what it is today and how the seemingly insignificant decisions being made today will effect the urban landscape of tomorrow.