When I was in high school, I changed my mind about what to major in every day. Some days, I wanted to go to culinary school and open my own bakery, and other days I was interested in becoming a school counselor and helping people like me. In the end, I decided to major in elementary education. I loved going to camp and working with the kids there, so I expected that being a teacher/education major wouldn't really be any different. Of course, that assumption was very wrong.
During my education classes, we'd always hear about becoming burned out and losing motivation to be a teacher. I didn't really know what that meant, but I wanted to do everything that I could to avoid that happening to me. Little did I know that that was already happening to me as a student. Now, I don't want to say anything about the education major. Everyone who gets through it is strong, determined, and ridiculously smart. I just learned during my junior year that this was not the path that I was meant to take. I wanted education and teaching to be an experience of playing games, painting pictures, and dancing around the classroom. I couldn't understand why we had to write so many papers and read so many articles all the time. I was legitimately burned out after two years and one semester of education courses. After the first semester of my junior year was completed, I realized that I could not be a teacher.
As an education major, I was concentrating on communication. I took a few communication classes during each semester and fell in love with them immediately. For a long time, I was very interested in double majoring because I wanted to prove that I could succeed in both disciplines. Once I realized that I wanted to change my major, there was no doubt in my mind of what I wanted the new one to be.
I had always been told that you need to declare your major by your junior year or you wouldn't be able to finish in time, and I worried that I was going to have to add extra time to my school plan. But I decided, on an impulse, to do it anyway.
After I changed my major, everything started to feel like it was falling into place again. I felt excited about going to school and classes again, and I was looking forward to the many opportunities that could arise from my program change.
As an education major, I was worried about the fact that I would be locked into one occupation for the rest of my life. Now, I am in such a vast major and I could end up doing anything after I graduate. Some days, I feel like I'm back to where I was in high school-- not quite sure what exactly I want to end up doing after I graduate. But now, I think that's perfectly okay and I definitely am looking forward to all of the possibilities.
