I have been in college for one academic year or two trimesters. This summer marks the third trimester, and its end marks the beginning of my junior year. I have had the privilege to do so much in the last year, from joining Alpha Delta Pi and becoming a chapter officer, to becoming an EMT, to being president of the Honor's Student Association. I am truly grateful. The one thing I have also had the pleasure of doing is changing my major - four times.

I thought I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I grew up thinking that I only have one life, I better do the highest position I could do that interested me, so being a doctor it was. I hated half the classes I had to take, but I was going to do it to get where I wanted to be. I thought that if I didn't do this, then I was letting everyone I knew down, letting my mom down. I was going to push through.

I ended up adding another major my first semester, Emergency and Disaster Management. I fell in love with it after a major presentation held by the department. I was extremely excited to have an EDM major and to get involved, so I enrolled in the EMT-B course at the technical school in town. I fell in love with it, too.

I finished my first semester, and I wasn't happy about it. Eighteen hours, being involved, and taking an EMT class was hard work. I came back from Christmas break completely miserable because of the classes that followed in the spring and even the years to come. I ended up going to see my academic adviser in February, and after an hour of talking to her, we came to the decision - I was changing my major. I was a triple major in psychology, Spanish, and EDM. Major change number two.

My EMT class required me to do clinical hours with the ambulance and in the ER. It was at the ER that I fell in love with nursing - a career I long ago vowed I would never do. A few weeks after I spent an hour in my adviser's office to change my major, I was at it again. This time, I decided on Pre-Nursing, which is not a major, just a focus on completing prerequisite courses in order to get into nursing school. Number three. I spent the next couple of months scouring nursing schools, planning out the next few years, looking into further schooling to become a Nurse Practitioner (NP).

It was one night I was studying for a chemistry test with a friend that I stumbled across a career known as a PA or Physician's Assistant. I spent most of the night researching it, schools for it, and comparing it to an NP and decided, at two in the morning, that is what I was going to do. I redid my four-year plan at Northwest following the requirements for a new major and set to talk to my adviser in the following days.

In April a week before the end of classes, I changed my major again to General Biology with a minor in Emergency and Disaster Management. Major change number four.

In two semesters, from August to April, I changed my major four times. I have been told the average is six. Do not be afraid to change your major, and do not be afraid to keep your major just because you do not want to take physics or zoology because you just may end up back where you started.