Deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life when you’re only 18-years-old is difficult. As high school graduates, we’re thrown into the college scene expecting to know exactly what career we want to have for the next 40 years. That’s unrealistic and puts pressure on each student to quickly make a choice of what they THINK they want to major in during their college years.

Now, I’m not saying that all students are like this. Some students do go into their freshman year of college completely set on what major they want, and props to them for that! But for those students who have no idea, whether you’re a freshman or a junior in college, you aren’t doing anything wrong.

I, myself, have changed my major three times (probably 15 times in my head) and I’m currently in my second semester of junior year. When I graduated high school, my first thought was that I wanted to go to nursing school. The nursing major seems to be very common, but it’s definitely not for everybody. If you don’t excel in chemistry and biology, I would suggest a different major. I had my mind set on nursing, no matter how hard I had to work for it, but I ended up changing my major the second semester of my freshman year. I decided that chemistry wasn’t for me and that I would rather do something else for a living.

From nursing, I transitioned to business. My father got his degree in Computer Management Systems and has a prestigious IT job, so I thought, why not? I signed up for economics classes, programming classes, and other business courses.

I struggled very much in economics but still kept trying for the next couple semesters.

I was decent with software programming but didn’t enjoy it.

It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year that I decided a business degree wasn’t what I wanted either.

At this point, I was confused, lost, and didn’t know what to do.

I searched on my college’s website for every possible degree that sounded interesting to me. My best subjects involve English and writing, but what are the chances of being successful with that, other than becoming a professor (which I didn’t want to do)? As I was scrolling through the page, I was trying to think of other things I’m interested in. It hit me that I love mysteries and crime shows and investigating.

I looked at the Criminal Justice major and had fallen in love with the idea of it. A few weeks before classes started junior year, I switched my entire schedule around with new classes for the Criminal Justice major. I felt like I was taking a huge risk, but did it anyway. That semester was just this past one, fall 2017. I thoroughly enjoyed those classes and actually had decided to minor in Sociology after taking the intro course and loving every minute of it while passing with a 99%.

But to be completely honest, I'm not even 100% sure that I want to minor in sociology anymore. I've done a lot of research on the pre-law minor and I've looked at all my options. The minor also involves some high-level English courses, which I love, so we'll see where this takes me. But, now I’m signed up for even more interesting criminal justice courses for this upcoming semester and I’ve very content with my choices.

Even though it took me a solid two years to (mostly) decide what I want to do with my life, with much trial and error, I’m happy with where I’m at now. I have three more semesters (and a summer semester) of college until I graduate with my four-year degree, and I’m looking forward to it. Maybe law school after that? We'll see.

When I think of a career, I think to myself, “would I love waking up each day to go to this job, or would I hate it?” No matter how much money you’ll get paid with a different career that you don’t enjoy, is it really worth your happiness and your sanity? I don’t think so.

My advice to you is to just not give up. There were many times when I just wanted to settle for something I didn’t love and just get through it, whether I was good at it or not.

But, I think I finally found what I was searching for, and you will too! No matter what year you are in college, never feel badly about changing your major. It’s perfectly fine to change your major three, four, or even five times. Wouldn’t you rather change it now instead of spending the rest of your life wishing you had?