Yes, finally! I, a little 19-year-old, have decided what I’m doing for the rest of my life… now what?
Every person who has gone through the college experience knows the pressures that come with choosing a major. First, let us point out that, for most universities, the deadline for choosing your major is usually during the end of your Sophomore year. Which means that the only resources you have to prove that you enjoy that field are your high school experiences and two measly years in college. I do understand that there is a certain time pressure that needs to exist because, as a student, you clearly don’t want to pay for an extra year of college because you didn’t fulfill the requirements in the four-year period. But, is it necessary to put so much pressure on a person who barely knows what they’re having for lunch? And if you have your life figured out by this time, please let me know how you did it. I wish we were all more like you, because it’d be a lot more efficient.
Now, let’s say that you’ve fell into the time-pressure themed structure of college and you find yourself at the end of sophomore year with no clue about what you want to study. What do you do? You could talk to advisers or counselors, but at the end of the day their opinion is just as valid as the random kid in your Spanish class’s. It’s all on you. And, if you ask me, that’s the scariest part of the entire process because you make the call that can break or make you. In the mean time, everyone around you is just saying, “No pressure!” No pressure? How are we supposed to relax when we’re supposed to sign up for classes on a certain day at a certain time? How are we supposed to relax when you need to know what you like and why? How are we supposed to relax when you’re asking us to choose our path when we’re not sure where that path will take us? So to make it all stop you say, “I’ll major in (insert major here)!”
Congrats. You’ve just made one of the most important decisions in your life because of time-pressure. Now what?
Now that the question, “What are you doing with your life?” is answered, you realize that there’s no actual reason to celebrate. Why? Because now that you’ve chosen a route for your life, you need to start gearing everything you do towards it. In other words, answering that question did not clear up things, it just made things a lot more complex. So complex, that you’ll be begging to go back to the time where you were an innocent child that did not have a course for your life. Grad school, internships, resume building, and all of the focused school work will be buzzing around your brain from the moment you declare your major, until the day you graduate.
As a Sophomore myself, I’m trying to cope with all the things going on, as well as accepting that life only gets more complex. So, the way I see it, I have two options: a) continue fighting it and try to cling to the things I know, or b) just let go and accept the mysteries that life has to hold for me. If other people have successfully made it out, why shouldn’t we?
