People are always peer pressured into deciding what they’re going to do when they grow up, and then one day, they actually grow up. Everything shifts from people asking you what you want to do, to telling you what you should do. It can be an extremely difficult time. You just graduated high school and now you’re on to college where you are constantly confused about what you want to do. Now that high school is over, it’s time to actually think about what you want to be when you grow up.
What really pushed me to choose my major was talking to my advisor. She allowed me to think about what I want to do with my life. This left me with the idea that I should branch out and really experiment with classes. With this, I was able to take classes that I probably would never have even thought of taking in order to figure out who I was as a person, and what I wanted to do in life.
This led me to talk to all of these professors who were more than happy to tell me what they majored in and why they choose the career path that they did. I was able to ask them questions that I found important to choosing my major, such as, “were you unsure about your major,” and “what events happened to make you choose your major?”
Your freshman year really is not like how people make it seem, where you think everyone around you has it figured out. Experimenting with classes really allowed me to take into consideration that I don’t need to choose a major based on what I think will make others happy, but what will make me happy.
In the long run, I sat down with one of my professors multiple times and asked her about what kind of field I could work in if I choose communication as my major. Then she went on about what types of careers people had, and she even offered to extend me to other resources if I wanted to do more research. At that moment, I was able to think about how helpful all these professors were, and how thankful I was that they were wanting to extend a network to me in order to figure out who I was as a person.
So don’t rush yourself into thinking, “what can I do differently if everyone has it figured out?” Think about how many options you have, and how it is okay to reach out to people before you make your final decision on what you want to do in life. At the end of the day, you are so young and have your whole life ahead of you. It’s important to remember you don’t need to have it all figured out at 18.