I’m 21 years old, and it’s taken me every single one of those years to decide what I want to pursue for a career.

As of now, my major is officially declared as a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design.

Through all of my middle school, high school, and first two college years, my mind was very much set on a future career in healthcare. Throughout high school I exclusively researched colleges with radiology, exercise science, and nursing programs. My favorite class in high school by a landslide was Anatomy and Physiology, and I never doubted my decision to study the sciences.

However, once I entered college and was exposed to a wider variety of courses, I very soon came to realize how much I dreaded my science and math courses and my academic course at the time of 'Pre-Medical Radiology' seemed like a horrible fit. To be honest it threw me in quite a loop and left me feeling unprepared and uneducated about any other career path options. Sciences had been so heavily promoted through my teenage years, I had never even thought to explore anything else.

Feeling a bit betrayed by my own intuition, or perhaps just by my lack of complete preparation due to my false sense of confidence, I knew a change of major was in order. I had been taking mostly generals and a few elective courses my first few quarters anyhow. I began to fall in love with humanities, social sciences, and communication classes I had never had access to in high school. Therefore, I was sensing a gravitational pull toward a B.A. rather than a B.S.

After taking the course ‘Fundamentals of Speech’ and ‘Interpersonal Communication’, it seemed overwhelmingly obvious that I should pursue a degree in Communications. Learning how to articulate my ideas and understand human interaction very much felt like the right choice and taking those classes fueled my desire to learn and felt like a remedy. So I declared my major as Communications, Public Relations.

However, the Public Relations curriculum required me to take several art classes, two of them being Design Principles and Color Theory. Wow. I can’t even begin to translate the way these classes captivated me. Studying design elements, principles, and color theory granted me access to the world through a new scope and brought my awareness to how visually illiterate most people (myself included) are. (In the way that literacy is being able to look at words and be able to interpret a message, visual literacy is the ability to look at visual imagery and interpret a message. It’s to analyze why certain elements are used to embody certain emotions, ideas, and abstract notions.)

The professor I took these classes from radically shifted my perspective of the world. He exceeded the expected curriculum to teach the course and continually shared life lessons to inform us of various interesting facts and ideas. He would create entire presentations just advising us about ‘things he wish someone had told him when he was a student’. And only some of the time did they pertain to art. I saw a burning passion behind everything that he did and I can say that it ignited my own flame.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I fall in love with passion. Perhaps this is why I felt falsely lead all throughout high school - I allowed the passion of my teachers in the ‘wrong’ subjects guide my enthusiasm. And honestly that is a mark of a great teacher - to make their students fall in love with the subject they are teaching.

And I believe the mark of an artist is curiosity fueled by passion. An artist is a person who genuinely loves learning.

The subject of art is not bound by rules or defined by its limitations. And that’s what is so limitless about art - it’s the tribute to EVERY subject. Hence why I loved almost every single class I took in high school. My variety of passionate and knowledgable teachers held me captivated in their subjects, triggering me to bravely and foolishly conceive an affection for each of their courses. In hindsight, I’m sure I academically behaved like a naive schoolboy that falls in love with every girl that looks at him.

I have found a certain hint of truth to the idea that “you get better at doing what you love by not doing what you love”. At least in my instance, in an artistic sense. Being academically misguided for so long equipped me with the perfect amount of experience and inspiration.

I can’t help but quote Randy Pausch -

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

After my frustration of feeling like I wasted so much time time burned off, I was able to clearly see why I was mislead for so long. And now that I’m able to make sense out of it, I feel overwhelmingly grateful to the grinding process that allowed me to make it here.