I grew up knowing who I was. I considered myself to be the right amount of girly and sporty. I would go to volleyball practice during the week and then head out to the mall with friends on the weekends. I never really drank or partied in high school, nor did I have much interest in it. I also had a pretty solid idea about what I wanted to do once I graduated from high school. I figured that I would major in kinesiology and take a physical therapy route. I would then go to medical school so that I could become a doctor of physical therapy. This idea came about since I had been involved in sports for most of my life.

Because of my original plan to become a physical therapist, I focused on applying to schools who had physical therapy tracks. I applied to four CSU's, two UC's, and one out-of-state and ended up getting into five out of seven. Eventually, I decided to attend San Diego State University and started to pack up my things to start my new college life. Turns out, I was in for a little reality check.

Now, here's the thing about me. I've never been particularly strong in the math and science areas of academics, but I was able to manage in high school. When I got to college, I thought to myself, "Sure, science isn't my thing, but I'll make it." So, you can probably see why declaring a science-heavy major was a big mistake, and I clearly underestimated how hard it was going to be. General Chemistry killed me. I found myself taking useless notes and failing nearly every single exam. The worst part of it was that I had a lot of friends in that class who also had no idea what was going on. It was basically the blind leading the blind. I was only able to pass that class because I did decent in my lab section.

Halfway through my first semester, I started to plan out the rest of the classes I had to take, and I became even more dead on the inside. I soon learned that in order to graduate, I would have to take a whole physics track as well as more difficult chemistry classes. Seeing as I was barely keeping my head above water in General Chemistry at that current moment, I started to have a mid-semester crisis. If I kept doing what I was doing, I would fall behind and never graduate on time.

Seeing as how my original plan I had made in highs school was falling apart, I started to fall apart as well. If I couldn't become a physical therapist, what was I going to do? Pretty soon, I became apathetic towards my school work. I cared very little about how much effort went into assignments and did the bare minimum in order to finish the semester without failing a class. At this point, I knew I had to change my major, but I had no idea what I was going to change it to. All I knew was that I had to get out before it was too late. At first, I thought about going into linguistics because it sounded interesting, but when I started doing more research, I found that the career prospects weren't that great. I also looked into other areas such as history, business, and even international business, but none of that ever really got my full attention.

When I was about to reach that point of no return and throw in the towel, I learned about a program at SDSU called International Security and Conflict Resolution, or ISCOR for short. It was basically a really fancy way of saying International Relations. What really caught my attention about the major was that it was very interdisciplinary and that I could take classes from a number of different departments. This included political science, history, and even anthropology. Not only that, but it also played to my strengths. It was more social science focused and involved very little math and science. I soon figured out that this was what I should've been studying all along and quickly rearranged my classes to fit the major.

What I learned from all of this is that you are never really sure about how things will play out. You may think that you have everything figured out, but then life happens and you become stuck in a rut. I had lost myself when I realized that I was never going to graduate as a kinesiology major. I thought that I was destined to be a college dropout. But, what kept me going is that life goes on. It may feel like it's the end of the world, but it's not. Now, I'm not saying that I have everything figured out, but I do know that if something does happen that I can adapt and make the best out of every situation. That doesn't just apply to college, but also to work, friends, family, and even dating. Life goes on, you just have to figure out how you'll go on too.