My whole life, I wanted to be a teacher. I had a huge box full of play teacher supplies, a chalkboard, a tiny globe, basically the works. I even used to write out “Student of the Month” certificates for whichever doll or teddy bear was my favorite at the moment. Teaching people was truly just second nature to me and was always my go-to play pretend scenario, no matter who I was with or where I was.

It wasn’t until my junior year of high school I figured out the subject and level I wanted to teach. Thanks to an infectiously passionate English teacher, a real-world Keating from “Dead Poets Society,” who will always have a special place in my heart. He flailed his arms, he yelled, he even turned me into a full-on Shakespearean actor a few times.

My confidence and then, dormant love of reading sprung to life that year and I decided I wanted to follow in my Keating’s footsteps and teach high school English with as much zeal as he did.

I applied to every college as an Education/English major, excited to crush my AP English exam and move on to St. John’s University. Until my last day of orientation, I made an impulse change to biology because I was told by others I was good at science and I ought to be a doctor. Yeah, I know, it was dumb. My hindsight is 20/20 everyone.

I spent my first year and a half of college stressed over biology and chemistry, like any other STEM major, but I was never able to see the end of the tunnel when I studied biology. I never saw myself getting my M.D. and working in a lab coat with sick people all day. I hated science. I realized I was only good at it because I was an overachiever.

On top of this, the large auditoriums and lecture halls my classes were in made me feel small and insignificant and my professors certainly didn’t help. When going to office hours to review exams, I was always asked my ID number first, as if those digits were permanently part of my identity. I hated the idea of professors putting numbers to faces rather than names to faces.

I started wondering if I was doing this for myself. I struggled during those three semesters for the fantasies I had of my parents bragging about their daughter who is a doctor, getting to one-up my cousin who also wanted to be a doctor, and being part of a power couple-- a successful wife who is a doctor with a husband who is an engineer. I was not in it for myself.

During that finals week, I changed my major to English, just a sliver too late to go to the School of Education.

My first semester as an English major was the greatest of my college career. I was challenged in ways I enjoyed. I was forced to think critically and defend my arguments about the works I read, rather than being forced to memorize and regurgitate facts and plot points or the theorems during my biology days. My professors know my face, and I’ve never felt more confident in a classroom than I do now.

Yes, this is a STEM world and science is the future, but I’ll be quite happy living in the past with my old tomes and my whiteboard (I never did like Smartboards) if it means I get to study and teach something I really love. I’d never want to clock in and clock out of a nine-to-five I’m not excited about.

Yeah, it might be harder for me to find a job with my B.A. in English, but it’s not the degree alone that gets you to the job: it’s your passion for the material. Be daring. Be rash and impractical.

Study what you love now, so work will feel like play when you reach the real world.