Changing your major is something that almost every college student does at least once, myself included. College is supposed to be a time in which we find ourselves and figure out what we want in life! While this is still something that resonates with me, I didn’t expect to have a crazy intense identity crisis during university.
Before I was in my current double major of Editing, Writing, and Media and Media/Communication Studies, I was majoring in Psychology. That’s something pretty different from what I’m studying now. Deciding to change my major wasn’t an easy decision, mostly because I liked what I was studying. I think that’s what made it so confusing. If I like my field, why do I feel like I need to change it?
When I thought about other people changing their major, I always thought it was this instantaneous “Aha!” moment where they just knew what they had to do. This wasn’t my experience at all. My encounter was more of a slow-burn paranoia that led into a full-blown spiral, and that’s not something you’re told at freshman orientation.
Funny enough, it all started when I saw a TikTok about a woman living in the Hamptons, showing a day in her life as a full-time private chef. She worked in the most beautiful house right by the beach and cooked the most delicious-looking food all day long. As someone who loves cooking, this looked incredible.
After seeing what the woman’s day at work looked like, I thought about what my day of working as a psychologist would look like and thought, Is this really what I want to do? I wasn’t so sure.
From there, I started thinking about what I genuinely wanted to do now that my original plans were not going to serve me anymore. This feeling of not knowing what I wanted was super scary, like I was free-falling with no parachute. I was so worried I was wasting my time, money, and effort on something now pointless, and that’s when the identity crisis started creeping in. Although I did spend a hot minute panicking about my life and my goals, I thankfully did find some things that relieved my catastrophe.
What helped me was shifting my perspective from thinking about the things that worried me to looking into what I wanted. I must’ve spent hours scrolling through the private chef’s TikTok while taking notes of what got me excited or what I could also see myself doing since it was her page that got me started in the first place.
Once I started seeing a pattern in the things I liked, I tried to compare that with the things I truly enjoyed doing and the skills I was confident in. I took all that information and helplessly scrolled through Florida State University’s list of majors before landing on Editing, Writing, and Media. Then, I scheduled a meeting with an exploratory advisor to make sure everything I was thinking about sounded right (I had no idea what I was doing) and formally changed my major.
The second scariest part of changing my major, with the first being the realization that I wanted to change it, was telling people about it. I was so worried that people would look at me differently or think I was being reckless, even though this couldn’t have been further from the truth. The best thing I could’ve ever done to remedy the fear was talk to my friends! No matter how worried I was about other people’s judgments or perceptions of me, my friends were 10 times more reassuring and super excited that I was slowly but surely finding my purpose.
I think the biggest thing I had to get over was still not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. To this day I’m still not sure. The greatest thing I accepted here is… that’s okay! It’s normal to not know exactly what you want. If anything, that can be exciting.
Not knowing what I’ll be doing five years from now seems scary at first, but it leaves the door wide open for countless opportunities to come flowing in. Not only that, but it also lets me focus on what’s enjoyable for me right now.
I took a random gen-ed course that sounded interesting, went to a few different GBMs for clubs I knew nothing about, and simply put myself in situations where I could learn about what’s out there. The worst thing that could’ve happened was that I didn’t like it and left, but the benefits I reaped were learning more about myself and finding things I loved that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
Now I love my major more than ever, feel secure in deciding to change it, and understand that having a crisis or two is just part of the process.
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