College, as proclaimed time and again through cliche quotes and elder words of wisdom, is the best four years of your life. It's the time you discover yourself and identify both who you are and the goals and aspirations you have for your life. It's a time for both successes and failures, triumphs and tribulations. You're 18. You're bound to screw up--it's all part of the learning process.
And yet, sometimes society doesn't allow ourselves to feel that way.
There's so much pressure placed on high school students to quickly figure out where and what they want to study, to plan out a career for the next forty to fifty years of their life when they've barely lived their own yet. At 18, I had no clue what I wanted in life. I knew what was recommended to me and the requirements needed to achieve it, but my ambitions ended there. I felt stifled, and quickly decided on a major that didn't necessarily peak my interest but seemed to promise me a secure future.
Within a semester of college, I dropped it and went undeclared.
I can safely attest to the fact that students who either go into college undeclared or switch partway through their freshman or sophomore years face a level of condescension which is, to put it bluntly, total bullshit. The premise of dropping my major included being chastised by my academic advisor, questioned by my peers and feeling like a failure. That was the worst part. The sensation that my life was over at 18 because I switched my major.
It's laughable in hindsight, but at the time I truly believed that my life was defined by the decisions i made at 18. And granted, to an extent, they are. But as humans, we're bound to evolve and change and want different things at different stages of our lives. We're bound to grow in and out of interests and hobbies, career goals and desires. It's natural. It's normal. It's HUMAN.
I wish someone at 18 had told me that failure is not the lack of success, but rather the lack of drive to carry forward. Success is not marked by people who've flourished the first time around; rather, it's achieved by people who have carried onward past adversities and made lemonade out lemons, happiness out of frustration.
My main message is this: you have time. You don't have to have every microscopic detail of your life planned out and set in stone at 18. You're a kid. Allow yourself time to grow and consider options and career paths you hadn't thought of or known about before.
Try.
Fail.
Try.
Fail.
Try.
Fail.
And then try again. And conquer.
