There is a certain sentence many upper-classmen HATE hearing, especially those of us who don’t exactly have it all figured out yet. Every time someone asks me this question, I cringe and try to find some type of food to shove in my mouth as quickly as possible so I don’t have to answer. It’s the question my mother asks me EVERY semester and people ask when they’re drilling you about college. If you haven’t caught on by now, then I’ll ask you, when are YOU going to graduate? For a lot of students, it’s four years, but for some of us, we had a struggle deciding what we wanted and that, of course, pushed us back a bit. Some college students know what they want from the first day they roamed UL’s campus. But for a lot of us, college is where we test the waters. We used to think we wanted to be firefighters and astronauts but now it’s the big leagues. Time to grow up and make our first “adult” decision. Picking a major we think ambitiously, we put forth our highest goal of want we want to be. I’ll give you some background on why I feel that graduating on time may not be number one on our goal list.

Personally, I wanted to be a Dermatologist and invent new lines of skincare for teens. Pretty awesome, right? Well after my first Biology test I realized maybe I overshot a little bit. Sometimes you just aren’t meant to be your first goal. SO then I switched my major to something completely different, Mechanical Engineering…insane right? Yeah, I see that too now. However I gained something, I knew I didn’t want to deal with major numbers. Check off my list. Next, I switched to Architecture because I always believed I was very creative. Well apparently, not creative enough. Projects I had slaved away at for hours and hours were seen as “generic” and “boring," while people who had thrown something together in 10 minutes received praise from the professors. This was NOT for me. I knew I couldn’t put my heart and effort into something that would never be reciprocated. So finally, I went to Business and Marketing and it stuck. I can already see the rewards of putting my energy and time into something I have truly come to love.

I may have changed my major four, YES FOUR times, but I’m TOTALLY okay with that. I know that I may be here longer than the status quo, but I know what I want and what I don’t want. And isn’t that the point of college? We are here to figure out our goals and what is next for us. Not just go along with the major we are in now because we want to graduate on time.Four years now isn’t the four years it used to be when our parents were in college. Orange is the new black, and FIVE is the new four (in college years, at least).