You’ve heard it all before, school is important, grades are important, they will get you into a good school where you can ultimately land the job of your dreams.
But when did what I major in become all of me? When did it become the first thing people ask me, when they meet me. When did it become something that I would ultimately be judged and secretly ridiculed for either to my face or after I walk away. It was all fun and games freshman year when people would ask each others major because It was our first year and no one really knew what they were doing or how they were going to get there.
Now all of a sudden the sophomore adjustment period hits and is everyone judging everyone for what their major is and laughing at the people who might actually think they have a shot in declaring it with the amount of prerequisites and a certain GPA to study what you want to study.
Since when did it become a competition to learn what you want to learn? Yes, I agree it’s the only thing that feasibly makes sense with all the other outputs taken into count. So here I am, probably not going to get the major that I intended on getting in the beginning of this year. Maybe if I didn’t slip up and have a couple bad exam grades and maybe not gone to the party when I should have stayed in and studied. But I can’t do anything about that now.
I can’t necessarily study what I want to study for the rest of my two and a half years at the university I chose because of the program I wanted. But that is okay. My major isn’t all of me; my GPA isn’t all of me.
I am not a score out of four or 100 percent. I am not what I study. I am what I do after all of this, after all the long nights in the library, after all the coffee I drink to actually wake up each morning. I am a person who is going to succeed by not what I study, but what I use after that. What I do to get a job and what I do with my studies to apply to the real world. The person I am is not the person I am on test day, but as a communicator, as a daughter, as a friend, as a sister, and as an kind hearted woman who will never give up despite not being able to have the intended major she wants to have.
I am a person who will succeed despite not being in the same classes as other people who think I don’t ever have to work hard or work at all because I am in a certain major and it is “easy” or doesn’t require work at all.
It is something that people don’t realize how little it matters until it is taken away from them and they have to work harder in order to receive the same success as someone who obtained it.
No matter what my major is or isn’t. School isn’t everything; life goes on with or without your bad exam grade or bad semester in general. You are not judged forever despite your thinking and you are not ridiculed on what you study and why you study it.
It is not the end of the world, what you do with your degree after college, that is something that is completely up to you. You will get there, work hard and it will pay off if it doesn’t this semester it will the next or vice versa.
I finally learned that stressing out about what to say to my great uncle on Christmas Eve about what I am going to study isn’t important. It’s what I do after college with my degree that matters and that is what will top my answer sophomore year for years and years to come.
Photo Credit: 1