Before I came to college, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. For as long as I can remember, it’s always been very clear to me that I would go into a creative field related to writing, and I had set my mind on a career path in journalism. At the time, it seemed to make perfect sense for me to focus on this major—I was a writer on the school newspaper in high school, my favorite class was English, and I’d always loved to write as a hobby. Whenever a friend or family member asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would proudly declare that I wanted to be a journalist, and I truly believed I did.
To my surprise, I may not have known myself as well as I thought I did. While I initially felt certain of my dream job, older students and adults around me always used to remark that most freshmen end up changing their minds about majors, some even switching between them more than once. After my first semester in college, I began to feel like perhaps I had chosen a major based on what I thought I should be doing rather than exploring other options. I had set my mind on journalism for so long that it didn’t occur to me that it may not have been the right choice for me.
Though I still didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, I still knew that the right career for me would be in a creative field and would still allow me to write. Up until I came to college, math and science were my absolute least favorite subjects. I spent countless nights stressing over homework assignments I didn’t understand, left too many exams feeling like a failure, and eventually told myself that my brain was not made to enjoy algebra and physics. To me, graduating high school meant that I would never have to take a class in a subject I wouldn’t enjoy again, which meant no more memorizing formulas and staring at numbers.
Yet, once again, I was proved wrong. My first semester of college, to fulfill my math requirement, I took a linguistics class on how computers understand languages and how programs like Google translate work. It was a class unlike any of the other classes I chose to take during that semester: it was heavy in numbers and algorithms, made me study for hours every night just to understand its concepts, and forced me think in a way I wasn’t used to. Nonetheless, it was still my favorite class by the time the semester ended.
That was when I decided to pursue a minor in programming. My friends and family were taken aback and even confused when I came home for winter break with a minor so different from what I had always enjoyed. After having set my mind on one field for so long, I even surprised myself by venturing into one I had never even considered. Up until that point, I had always thought of computer science as just another subject in math or science that I would never be interested in. It wasn’t until I took a class outside of my comfort zone that I realized that learning programming was a lot more than that: it was like learning another language.
When I first came to college, I thought I had absolutely everything figured out, and I definitely didn't. While everyone around me kept telling me I would eventually figure out the right career path, it wasn’t until I started taking classes unrelated to what I thought I wanted to do that I got closer to what I really did.
If someone told me two years ago that I would be willingly taking computer science classes and actually enjoying them, I would have laughed. To anyone who feels like they still don’t know exactly what they want to do: take some time to try out classes that interest you, even if they’re totally different from what you’re used to. I've been here for almost three years and I'm still not sure what I'll end up doing. Maybe I'll even change my mind again.
