All my life, I've never really known what I wanted to do.
Most kids growing up had an idea; they wanted to be a doctor, a teacher, an astronaut. Me- I didn't really ever know. Summer before senior year of high school, though, I had an idea. Following my online forensics class, I thought... maybe I could be a criminal investigator? So criminal justice became my "official major" on my college application, and on I went into the big wide world of college.
For the first year and a half, I was a Criminal Justice major. Sure, I liked it for the content I was learning, but I quickly found out that this "dream career" I had in mind didn't really exist outside of TV shows. That was quite the shocker to little freshman me, but still, I thought that I could figure out something that would call to me in the crime/justice department.
Sitting in my lectures the fall semester of my sophomore year, I started thinking more and more. The overwhelming pressure of figuring my life out in such a short time period kept getting to me. If I hadn't figured something out in this field that was for me, how long was it going to take? What if I never figured it out and ended up with a degree in something that I didn't really care about? As cliche as it sounds, I don't want to hate my job, so my degree is very important in securing that desire.
That's when I started thinking about journalism. Wow, it just made sense once I started thinking about it. Heck, I'd been on staff with the college yearbook for almost a year now, and I have quickly moved up in the ranks here with Odyssey and am currently serving as the contributing editor. Maybe it wasn't in criminal justice where my future was hiding--maybe it was multimedia journalism.
After this oh-so-obvious-in-hindsight epiphany, I talked with my mom and with some of my friends, and then immediately scheduled an advising appointment with a communications advisor. She welcomed me right into her office early the next week, mapped out the next five semesters of my life, and sent me on my way feeling more confident about my college career than I had in a long time. While I have yet to take any of the classes relevant to my major at this time, I am looking forward to them with a lot of excitement; who knows, I might find exactly what it is that I'm looking for!
So for now, I will sit through my endless lectures on juvenile justice and the psychology of gender while dreaming of next semester and the semesters that will follow, filled with writing and journalism and media ethics and everything in-between. The next few years are going to be hard, but they are going to be oh-so-worth-it when all is said and done. Though I don't have every little thing figured out, I'm hoping that through journalism, I will be able to narrow down exactly what and where it is that my future lies, and I cannot wait to see what that looks like.
