After two years of striving for near-perfect grades in my college courses and pursuing as many internships as I could, I have finally declared a major. When choosing the University of Washington for college, my biggest worry was that there was no guarantee I would study what I wanted. While many other schools allow students to easily declare a major, UW has a selective process for many majors. Coming to this school as a pre-sciences major has given me copious amounts of stress and many late nights worrying about what I will do if I don’t get in. I scoured countless Reddit threads, learning about situations where people transferred schools or added years to their graduation date just because they didn’t get into their desired majors.
I explored a variety of other courses, from Public Health to Business, trying to figure out alternative routes I could take. When I started taking the prerequisites for the Informatics major, I grew even more stressed. The majority of my classmates were also applying for the major and had tons of experience with technology. Some of them had been coding since childhood, attending hackathons, and creating their own apps. The majority of my classmates were extremely qualified and deserving of being in the major. This made the process all the more stressful as I second-guessed my own qualifications. With so many applicants and so few available spots, how did UW make decisions about who should be let into the major? I had ‘backup’ options that my advisor told me were just as competitive. I was encouraged by others to consider open majors such as Geography, which I had little interest in.
When it finally came time to apply for the major, it felt a lot like college applications all over again, stressing over my GPA and personal statement. This one application felt like it would determine the rest of my academic career and, in turn, my future. In retrospect, I can see how dramatic I was, but there was no reasoning with me at the time. I re-wrote my personal statement multiple times and went to the writing center in Mary Gates Hall every day for a week. It sucks that UW has to constrain its majors because of limited resources and faculty availability. However, it is something that everyone (minus the blessed few who get in via direct admission) has to deal with. Talking to other students was beyond helpful for me during this process. I have found that most students who are in their major are more than willing to help others because they have been in the same boat, trying to find their place at this massive university.