Now that the summer is halfway done, it seems like every time I open Facebook, there’s 10 new articles on my feed trying to tell me about what is going to make me happy in my 20’s, and which schools are ranked as having the best Greek life, and what my college major says about me. At a time when there is a new school year approaching and subsequently a lot of change on the horizon, I believe that the most important thing to stress is that it is okay to be unsure of things.
Many girls will be headed to college for their first year expecting to rush a sorority, or to start working on the major that they’ve dreamed about since they were six, or to find the man of their dreams at the same school in which their parents met. Whatever your journey is, there will be moments when decisions are hard or you make the wrong ones. You have to be able to be okay with all of that. College is as much about learning who you are as it is about learning in your classes.
I am notorious in my family for being strong willed. I decide what I want and go after it with everything I have. Often I don’t stop to think about my decisions until I’ve made them. When I started applying to colleges, my life had been leading me towards more artistic endeavors. I had spent my entire high school life prepping to be an acting major. I took dance lessons and singing lessons, and I was in four plays a year since I came to high school.
When I reached my dream college as an acting major, however, something still wasn’t right. People had told me before I graduated high school that a bunch of people changed their majors, or even transferred schools after their freshman year. But I thought that I knew myself well enough not to do anything I wasn’t completely sure of. My first acting classes left me confused because for the first time since I was ten years old, I wasn’t sure that this was what I wanted. And the thing that made everything harder was thinking nobody else felt the same way.
Feeling uncertain about something was new to me, and I actually thought that the other women I was friends with weren’t having the same doubts and anxieties about their decisions as I was. In reality, everyone feels the same way about college.
At this age, everyone is feeling uncertain about some aspect in their life. There are uncertainties about college majors, going Greek, picking the right school, and a million other things. I think that the best thing to remember when starting college is that the experience is meant to be entirely yours—whatever that may mean to you—and not knowing what you’re doing 100% of the time is okay.
What you want may change, and if you feel like you need to change paths, then you should. Even if you think it may be too late to transfer or change majors, it isn’t. I have been happier since I switched majors then I ever could have dreamed possible, and if I hadn’t, I have no idea where I would be now.
Trusting your intuition and yourself is the most important thing you can do in college because at the end of the day, you’re the only one who knows what you need. You’re the only person who will have to live with the decisions you make. So be confident, trust yourself, and in the end, know that college is meant to be an experience for yourself.
