It’s about that time of the year. When your clothes are fitting a bit tighter, hometown baes are starting to hit your line, and finals have gotten your sleep cycle forever stuck in another time zone. Yes, college students, I’m talking to you.

I went through all of these things these past few months during my Freshman year, and have vowed to get my great figure back that I came to Howard with, not give hometown ex-baes the satisfaction of my growth as a woman, and to sleep as much as possible. But I also made a new vow: follow my passions shamelessly and with courage.

I say that because when I first came into college, I came into Howard as an international business major. I centered all of my passions around obtaining a financially stable and comfortable lifestyle because I thought that’s what I had to do. When I was in high school, obtaining money was a common struggle. It was then that I knew I wanted to make a lot of money and make my grandparents proud of me because of it. Hence, I became a business major with the intention of being very wealthy. They truly didn’t believe I could do that as a writer, advocate or artist. And I was all of these things and more.

I have a deep passion for writing and a niche for storytelling, so I decided I would make that my business to compensate for not pursuing my craft forward. The first semester was easy: just do your pre-requisites and listen to all of these inspirational speeches from upperclassman business majors that have mile long resumes with every necessary experience you could think of. And you knew one day you’d get to be some version of them too. I thought I’d establish a publishing company and that would be the key to my success -- my business. I put my focus into that my first semester.

It was the second semester of my freshman year, however, that pushed me to deviate from the original plan in an extremely fulfilling way. I had met someone who I cared for deeply who was so passionate about everything he set his mind to. He saw the passion in my eyes when I would work on one of my writing projects, or talked about how I wanted to take over the world with stories I would to tell, or how watching movies and listening to profound music inspired me in inexplicable ways to write about topics that make me uncomfortable or scared me, but were real.

He would simply ask me questions that started out the same: “Why?” Why are you a business major? Why do you want an internship so badly? Why do you love writing so much and won’t do anything about it? I guess I began to ask myself those same questions, and something clicked.

I had always been passionate about performing arts and writing, but during the first semester, all I cared about were simplistic things: getting an internship with a “good” business company because it looked good on my resume, getting straight As in classes I cared nothing about and graduating to do a 9-5 job that I knew I would hate. I tried my hardest to make it work, but the business major I realized was not for me.

It’s a fact that once that fire is lit under your ass that it’s just going to keep burning; it’s not going to stop. It wasn’t an instant moment that I knew, more like a longing that I never thought I’d ever have the courage to do. I thought it would ruin everything I had worked hard for, but it did the exact opposite. Everything fell into place and suddenly made sense when I began to register for classes under a different major with the intention to change it, and I did.

If you have a passion for something, you’re going to be so unbelievably happy all of the time and you will work HARD every day because that is what you love unconditionally. It’s your absolute passion. And if you’re anything like me, it’s going to be damn hard getting to where you want to be within your craft, but you’ll never stop working. I was lucky to see what it was that I truly wanted to do as a freshman in college, but most people are holding onto certain majors because it’s the financially wiser decision. Don’t buy into that, because the only person that loses is you.

Over these few months of really thinking about what made my fire burn brighter, I became a TV Media and film production major. And yes, it did change everything.