“What do you want to be when you grow up?”, seems to be the question we’ve all been asked since we were in elementary school. At that time, we all had grand ideas of what our professions were going to be from actresses to astronauts…we felt invincible. Now we are approaching that time when we are “grown up” and the answer to that question doesn’t seem too simple anymore. We have gone from thinking we could be anything in the world (which we still could) to worrying about how we are going to get to where we want to be and achieve what we want to achieve. It’s scary! In high school, you think you have so much time to figure it out and while that may be true, the minute you hit college it is engrained in your mind that you have to know what you want to be right now. After many freak-outs and calls home to mom, I’ve realized that is not the case.
From the minute you get to college orientation, the four years already seem so short. You schedule your first semester classes but always have to be cognizant of what you are going to take for the next couple of semesters down the road, major forward thinking initiatives that not many college freshmen are prepared for. Everything seems to be in high-speed motion and what I’ve quickly learned is that the only way to enjoy your time and not stress is to slow it down as fast as possible. You need to take it all in and realize that the rest of your life is not hinging on the first five classes you take in your first 6 months of college. Those classes were all decided with our first counselor at orientation when we were still not fully realizing we were actually doing this thing called going to college.
Realistically, college will teach you the basic steps to excel in your future profession but as we all know, humans learn best by doing. This leads to the beauty of internships. You may think you want to be one thing but how will you know if you’ve never actually tried it? It is somewhat easy for students to pick a major when you are sitting with your counselors because it all seems fun and easy. “Oh yeah I’ll just do that, it seems fun.” The reality is, you don’t know if you truly like it until you have been in the job environment and seen how it all goes. Internships are usually not common until your junior year so take the time before that to explore all the possible options. And take some interesting classes along the way that may not have been in your big plan. They could lead you to a different and more interesting direction…who knows?
The bottom line here is that it is extremely difficult to know what you want for the rest of your life at the tender age of 18. Of course there are those students who have known what they wanted from kindergarten but that probably isn’t the vast majority. The rest of us thought we sort of knew in high school, then sort of thought we would follow through with that in college but there are many others who changed their minds and went down different paths. We are still in college and it is fine and normal to change your mind and possibly your education direction. For your parent’s sake, it’s cool… as long as you still continue to have a direction.
