I recently realized I had no idea what I was doing with my life and it freaked me out.
But let me start at the beginning —
Junior year of high school, I was introduced to Joan Didion’s work. I was inspired by her incredible storytelling, control of language and style, and decided I was going to move to New York and become a journalist. So that’s what I set out to do. But it was a little bit more complicated than that. I’d always known I loved theater, but was too shy to pursue it in high school. I knew theater runs through NYC’s veins, so it would be the place to go.
College was my time. Inspired by Meryl Streep studying theater costume design at Vassar, I took a costume design class freshman year and absolutely loved it. I loved reading the plays, learning about the history of the costumes, and famous costume designers, but most of all, I enjoyed being around theater people. But I decided that I was out of place because I didn’t have a lot of theater experience and didn’t deserve to be ‘one of them.’ To challenge my own thinking, I took an acting fundamentals class, which caused me to fall deeper in love with theater.
I continued to take theater and journalism classes. Theater felt like a bonus treat every semester. I did enjoy some of my journalism classes, but as I got deeper and deeper into it, the more I realized I didn’t know what I wanted — I didn’t have a journalism beat (or main focus), I loved creative non-fiction, but that’s difficult to pursue straight out of college and I struggled with some of the foundational aspects of it like interviewing people and report writing.
At this point in my college career, everyone around seemed pretty set on their paths, so I felt that there was something wrong with me.
Until I talked to members of the New School community, who shared about their experiences and advice:
Elan – Staying in a major that’s not the right fit for you is not worth your time or tuition.
Stevie – “I’ve definitely questioned my major just because journalism is a really hard profession to get into. Ultimately, I sat with myself and said “what else would you rather do” and when I came up with no other option I knew it was what I was meant to do. I added a minor with a more stable career field for a safety net and now I’m just going with the flow.”
Harsha – “While applying to Parsons, I didn’t think much about my major, I just went with a stem course that had something to do with design, it was for my counsellor to show me how the career paths for each major changed the way someone looks at a major. I knew design and tech wasn’t for me instantly. If it wasn’t for her I would’ve graduated with a degree I didn’t even want”
Sonya – “Personally, I don’t feel like I experienced a lot of social pressure to stay in my major. What I struggled with more was taking a leap of faith in myself and trusting that I could excel at something other than journalism. I’ve been interested in the sciences for a long time, but lacked the confidence to actually pursue taking classes that were outside of my comfort zone. Especially having a background in writing and liberal arts, it took me a long time to stop limiting myself to only one field of academia. The advice I’d give someone else who’s considering switching majors is to start by taking one or two classes in the field. After I did this, I felt much less intimidated and realized that I had been holding myself back for no reason.”
Claudia – “I was so set on being a J+D major when I arrived at Lang in the Fall of 2018, but when I completed my first nonfiction workshop, I started to question whether I wanted to be a journalist. My professor said that if I was more keen on being a writer, then Literary Studies was the way to go. In high school I was super involved with the school paper—as a reporter who worked her way up to being EIC. I felt like I was betraying part of my personality by steering away from journalism, and feared what the newspaper advisor would think of my decision. This is for sure a stigmatized topic, and I think this because what you choose to major in says so much about you—it’s why I want to know what each of my classmates are studying at TNS. College is a time to explore yourself and you interests, so if you have time to complete a program you’re *actually* interested in, then I say go for it 100 percent!”
McKelvey – I decided to change programs after spending about a semester at Lang because I felt that the program at Lang was too broad and theory-based, and I wanted to transfer to the bfa program because it would be more focused, something that I was really looking for with my education. My only word of caution, though, is that transferring is really hard, even though I was just going to a different program in the same school. i had to submit lots of paperwork, applications, i had to audition again, etc. it was also really hard to transfer any of my lang credits over to the school of drama… My advice to anyone seeking to change majors is to go with your instincts and do your research. If you think it’s the right choice, then you should definitely go through with it.
Stacie – I realized I can make a career doing something I loved. I invested more time into my interest and found people who validated my work as I learned.There are lots of stereotypes to every profession. It’s always worth looking at all your interests to see which you could use to carry yourself out in the long term.Take classes and ask yourself, “Is this something I could do for a large portion of my life?” College is a great time to experiment, it’s only a small portion of your life in the grand scheme of things.
These perspectives and pieces of advice are all to say that I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I have learned that being a little lost and open is not a unique experience and that there wasn’t anything ‘wrong’ with changing paths, college really is the time to experiment. There is no ‘wrong’ way to do college — except, if you’re not loving what you’re doing. As all of these wonderful people have illustrated: follow your heart and do not be afraid to change directions or not have all of the answers.
Because no one does.