I remember signing up for classes in high school by picking classes at random from a blue sheet of paper. There was no rhyme or reason to it -- we didn’t even have advising appointments. You just had to pick the classes you wanted, regardless of where that would take you later in life.

When it came time to register for the SAT, I decided not to since I planned to go to community college right away. I can’t tell you why I made that decision because I’m not sure I even knew. All I do know is that no one ever talked to me about going to college, how to choose a college, or what I should be doing to prepare for college. Being that my parents and I were immigrants, still foreign to the American school system, neither of them gave me any kind of college talk either because they simply didn’t know. I wandered through high school by going through the motions; my career there had no meaning.

The big joke my senior year was to wear community college sweatshirts. Since everyone who applied to universities wore the sweatshirt of the school they picked as their official announcement, those of us who didn’t choose that path felt left out. Looking back, this idea was pretty offensive. It was seen as an admittance of being lesser. I hate that.

I ended up at Moorpark College two days after I graduated high school. I was determined to “get out” in two years, since it was already frowned upon to choose a two-year college instead of a four-year university. I took several summer classes and loaded up my fall semester. I was a psychology major and I finally had a direct list of classes I needed to take in order to get my Associate’s Degree. But I quickly felt like I was stranded in the middle of an ocean with no island in sight.

I spent two years on my Associate’s in Social and Behavioral Studies, and applied to two schools: what I thought was my dream school of San Diego State University, and the local California State University Channel Islands. I had a big plan to move to San Diego and live the wild college life my immigrant mind had always dreamed of. You know the scenes in movies of the raging college fraternity parties? That’s what I wanted. And that’s really the only thing I knew about San Diego State.

I was rejected from SDSU due to their heavily impacted psych major, but I was accepted to CSUCI. I took it as a pretty huge loss, but soon realized it was my fault. I was not prepared to apply for an impacted major, and my transcript wasn’t any kind of spectacular that they would want me. Again, it came down to that fact that I just didn’t know. I accepted my offer to attend CI in the fall and began signing up for classes, almost giddy that I was finally attending a “real” university.

One week before classes started at Channel Islands, I full-on freaked out. I’m talking ugly-crying to the max. I realized I didn’t want to be a therapist and that made my psychology degree quite worthless. I dropped all my classes and registered back at Moorpark.

The next decision I made at Moorpark was to change my degree to Communication Studies. I made this choice based on a five-minute conversation I had with a stranger. Said stranger told me she majored in Comm and it was widely applicable. So that’s what I did.

I spent another two years at Moorpark getting my second Associate’s Degree, and as I did so, I watched my Facebook timeline fill up with pictures of pointy hats and beautiful tassels, with captions like, “I did it!” It was rough. For what felt like the thousandth time, I was lost. It seemed I never knew what direction I needed to go until it was too late. But I buckled down and finished my second degree in a year. I reapplied to CI and CI only, this time just needing to get the damn thing done. I didn’t want another rejection letter from a school I thought I longed for, I just wanted to be able to post a picture on Facebook saying I was accomplished- I was like the rest of them. And then, at the end of my last semester at Moorpark I realized I had a real knack for something: public speaking.

That spring semester was packed with Comm classes so I could get my degree and transfer. All five, however, were taught by coaches of Moorpark’s speech and debate team. I was approached by four different coaches, urging me to join the team, and there wasn’t a fiber in my being that didn’t want to. I finally excelled at something, finally had an up on people I went to high school with, finally was given direction in my academic career.

I knew this would be another setback if I chose to join the team. I was now twenty-one without a college degree, and as much as I wanted to compete I knew I had to keep making strides toward that piece of paper. So, I enrolled in the minimum number of classes I needed at Moorpark to be eligible to compete with their speech team, but also decided to continue towards my Bachelor’s at Channel Islands. I attended two schools, worked two jobs, and had an amazing first year on the speech team.

During that first year on the team, it was clear that I really loved what I was doing. It was the first purposeful thing I’d done in college, and I was finally accomplishing things. I ended up winning a national title and made some of the best friends I could imagine. I met new people, I became more intelligent and aware in that year that I had done in my entire lifetime, and I began to love who I was. I had a thought that if I competed for another year, I might be able to get recognized by a University with a speech program, and that could propel me further than Channel Islands could. That became the new goal: make it big in forensics and attend the best school in the country for speech.

And the rest is history. Now I’m heading into my second semester at Bradley University. When applying, I changed my major -again- to Journalism and decided to apply to law school once I got my BA. Last week, I officially added a Political Science minor, which will probably keep me in Peoria for another semester, but will add a strong combination of degrees and hopefully make me very attractive to a law program.

I’m 24. I don’t have my Bachelor’s Degree, but I have a plan. And I’m okay with that.

Just like my college career, this article took the long way around to urge you to finish school at your own pace- but that’s what it comes down to. There are so many societal pressures to earn your degree in four years, but we’re not all fortunate enough to know where we want to end up as an eighteen-year-old senior in high school. So, do you. Change your mind. Ask questions. Make yourself happy. Make yourself proud. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get where you want to be, the only thing that will matter when you’re old and grey is that you got there.

So get there.