We’ve all seen the jokes on Twitter or Facebook about showing up to Thanksgiving and being bombarded with questions about our major, our relationship, and our plans after college. Answers to any of these questions usually seem to be met with the head tilt and passive-aggressive answers that we as college students see right through. I want to know when it became the norm to have your whole life planned out before you’re 21? Everyone tells you when you hit college that you need to start figuring things out; but nobody ever tells you that it’s okay not to know.
When we’re little it’s ingrained into our minds that we can be whatever we want. It’s a question we get asked our whole lives “What do you want to be when you grow up?” However it’s different when we’re little, nobody has the heart to tell you as a second grader that you’re too short to ever play in the NBA or in the fifth grade that your math skills are too poor to ever be a rocket scientist. No, they tell you that if you practice every day and work hard to achieve your goals that there’s nothing you can’t do; anything is possible.
Everything changes when we get to college, suddenly our answers of “I want to be a princess” or “I want to be an astronaut” don’t make sense. Nobody tells you “Great! What classes are you going to take to get there?” They ask you what your major is, and for the record, I still want to be a princess when I grow up. But future employment ideas that don’t involve a stable income and a 9-5 job are usually laughed at, so we forget them. But what happens next? What if I don’t know what I want to be? It’s a huge decision. We’ll be spending tons of money and the next four or five years of our life working towards this future we decided on, so what happens if we don’t know what we want to do?
I switched majors at the end of my sophomore year, not drastically but enough to make a difference and of course I got their surprised looks and their passive-aggressive head tilts. Isn’t that breaking the Golden Rule though? If you’re going to change your major do it early before you’ve wasted all that time, but why not change your major a few times during your sophomore or even junior year, it certainly beats spending the rest of your life using a degree you don’t like. It’s frowned upon to change our minds and change our path because we’ve already spent all this time and all this money and we should “have a plan” but I say it’s okay not to know. I say it’s okay to change your mind and then change it again, because darlings, your happiness far surpasses your need for a plan.
I wish someone had told me, so I’m telling you. It’s okay not to know what you want.
