My first choice college wasn’t where I ended up going. The major I first declared wasn’t what I ended up studying for four years. Plans I had intended to follow for four years didn’t follow through. And looking back now, I’m more than okay with that.

I graduated high school a day short of turning 18 with all ambitions of becoming a biochemist and going away to college. I never applied to a large school, or a school any further than 30 minutes from my house for that matter. My parents convinced me to stay local, and at the time I resented them for it. Everyone was leaving home, decorating their dorms, meeting new people but here I was living in the same room I have been in since first grade and commuting back and forth to a small college. It still felt like high school, and at the beginning I hated it.

Notre Dame College was a 25 minute commute on a good day. On a bad day it ranged from 45 to well over an hour and a half due to the weather in Northeast Ohio. I felt out of place for a while. Even though all of these people just met, they had been at Welcome Weekend together. I missed out on it because of work, so I felt like I missed out on all the introductions.

I was wrong of course. There was plenty of time to make friends in class, and just because I wasn’t living on campus didn’t mean that I had to miss out on the fun. I stayed over in friends’ dorms, I stayed late on the days I didn’t work and did homework or had movie marathons. It didn’t take long to learn that the best way to have fun was to make it yourself. And when things stopped becoming fun, it was those friends that I made that helped me figure out how to make it better. It was a major switch. It was leaving the world of science and stepping into the world of art. It was taking a leap of faith and not looking back.

College was full of choices. There were electives to take. Optional minors to declare. Schedules dictated what classes you could actually take, and sometimes your friends’ schedules made deciding even harder. Notre Dame College provides every student that steps through their doors with a liberal arts education. This meant even as an art major I had to take courses in science, math, history, theology and philosophy. I dreaded some of these courses, they were just subjects I didn’t want to study. But other than that, I never thought much about this liberal arts requirement. I thought of it as the “core curriculum” like I had dealt with in high school. I could get through it, even if I felt like I hated it at the time.

It wasn’t until I was an Orientation Leader sitting in on the Parent/Faculty discussion at a freshman orientation the summer before my junior year that one of the professors read off the mission statement of the college. I’d heard it a few dozen times before, but for the first time someone was asking the orientation leaders to tell the parents of the incoming freshman what we thought the mission statement meant.

“Notre Dame College, a Catholic institution in the tradition of the Sisters of Notre Dame, educates a diverse population in the liberal arts for personal, professional and global responsibility.”

Without hesitation, I answered that a liberal arts education meant that I was getting a better understanding of the world around me. I was learning skills that could help me all throughout life. Though I wasn’t religious, theology courses helped me to understand why people follow religion and I gained a greater appreciation for the field. Speech courses helped me to put my thoughts into words and articulate them more clearly. Philosophy helped me start to ask more questions in order to understand situations more clearly, to think critically to solve problems, to never stop seeking new sources of knowledge. Marketing and Advertising helped me to grow as a leader as I lead a team in presentations and worked to organize schedules for meetings. As you branched out into electives - took a biology class to understand how the basic functions of life actually operate, a history class to understand how cultures and past events have shaped the world today, an art class and learned the basics of form, hue, value, and saturation - you learned to appreciate topics that you may not have cared about before.

Soon after this realization, college became less about my degree and more about what I could take away for the bigger picture. I’ve learned skills that allow me to design things like flyers, logos, and booklets. I learned how to use a camera and pick the best composition for photos. I learned about marketing strategies, consumer behavior, and basic accounting. I spent hours studying stoichiometry and chemical structures. That barely scratches the surface of what I studied, and in all honesty, I probably don’t remember most of it.

I went to college expecting to walk out in four years with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry. I walked out in four years with a Bachelor of Art in Graphic Design, concentration in Marketing, minors in Multimedia and Art. It looks great on paper, sure, but in reality, I walked out with a full liberal arts education that can help me in more ways than I can even begin to explain.

A wise man once told me “You don’t go to college and plan to be an Executive Team Lead at Target. Sometimes it just happens that way.” If you told that to the eighteen year old that still worked in the pizza shop and wanted to be a biochemist, she would have laughed in your face. You tell that to the college graduate who has worked in retail for over two years and continues to keep moving forward with Target and she’d tell you he was absolutely right.

The marketing concentration may have lead me to the discovery that I love consumer behavior and enjoy working in a retail setting, but the combination of classes I took has helped me succeed in this journey. Critical thinking, leading a team, having an open mind, articulating my ideas, and having an open mind are all skills I have gained from a combination of classes that I can continue to use and improve on as I grow and move forward with a career in retail.

So next time you’re sitting in that class that you absolutely hate, take a minute and look at the bigger picture. There’s a message you can take away, and you never know how it just might help you down the road.