Choices
One week down, fourteen more to go!
I’d like to join my fellow Wolverines in a collective sigh of relief after having successfully made it through the first week of classes. However, I’m also a part of that group sighing over the stack of readings and assignments we had to tackle this weekend. While I know that we’ve had to make quick work of jumping back into the academic swing of things, I can’t tell you how excited I am that fall is finally underway.
With week one under my belt, I already know that I’m going to love my classes. I’m excited that I’ll be learning material I can use in the future, which is a bit different from where I was when I started two years ago. For the first year and a half, I was majoring in Medical Technology & Biology, waffling between foreign language and Chemistry minors, and following a pre-medicine curriculum. Growing up with parents in the medical field, that was just the natural course of things – major in science, go to medical school, become a doctor, period. It didn’t matter to anyone what I did as long as I became Dr. Erika Trigg, M.D., be it sleepless nights studying or spending hours studying in the library (that doesn’t go away, though, no matter what you’re majoring in).
However, at the end of last fall, I made the decision to switch my major to Communication to pursue a career in Student Affairs. While I was certainly nervous about making such a drastic switch, I have to say it was one of the most liberating things I’ve done. When I finally took the time to consider if the plan I had for half of my life had been mine or if it was just expected of me, it hit me that it wasn’t what I wanted.
My heart has been in planning events, interacting with people, and being hands-on since I was in high school. In the two years that I’ve been here, I’ve had the chance to get really involved on campus and work two jobs, through which I’ve had some of the greatest experiences. Realizing that I could make a career out of doing all of the things that I love renewed my excitement about my education; I was excited about the options that I had, and took a couple of different classes beyond communication so I could further explore my interests. After winter, I decided to minor in Psychology, and between those courses and the ones in my major, I’m learning a lot of different things that I find useful now and things that I look forward to being able to apply after graduate school.
Moral of the story: Take advantage of all of the general education classes we have to complete. While it may just seem like a long list of requirements in the beginning, think of it as an opportunity to find yourself and figure out what you enjoy studying. If you already know what you want to do, you get the chance to take classes outside of your discipline and expand your knowledge. Take that computer science class because you like programming, or sing in the university chorale because you’ve wanted to be a singer since you were six. Either way, it’s a win-win because you get to do something you enjoy and you need these things to graduate. Don’t ever be afraid to take something different, because you never know where those interests could take you.
