Let me tell you a story.
Not that long ago, there was a girl who wanted everything. She looked at everything she could get her hands on, sometimes shoving people out of the way to grasp what wasn’t even hers. She watched people mill about in the streets, at the park, in the hallways of her school or anywhere her eyes would allow her to venture. She would taste everything she could place on her tongue. She would smell every flower, every perfume and get a whiff of a person’s scent when hugging them. She read every book on her bookshelf, and when she was done with those, she would seek other forms of writing wherever she went. She found songs, poems, scripture, literature, memoirs and fairy tales. She read emails, articles, social media posts and texts.
But most of all, she wanted knowledge.
She grew to be a strong woman of intellect. Her deep desire for all knowledge was also her weakness, for when it came time to choose a subject to focus on for college, she could not choose. She entered her collegiate years as an undecided student because of her indecisiveness. Choosing what classes to take was easy, but getting into them? Well, that was another task she had to manage.
Because of her deep desire for all knowledge, she took as many classes as the university would let her before she had to start paying additional fees. Many classes required other classes to be done before them, or to have such a level of academic success in math or writing to be considered worthy of a course. Due to such limitations, she made her choices for the first time, not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
She took a writing class that taught her the basics of structuring papers for future classes. She took a biology course on the formation of cells and how plants photosynthesize. She took a history course to learn about art from Greek and Roman cultures. She took a theatre course to learn about the stage and what goes on behind the scenes.
And after all that, after the first semester, she still couldn’t decide what to choose.
This bothered her immensely at first, but then realized that it was alright when she learned of so many other students trying to make the same choice she was. She learned more about them to see what they had to offer. Their insight, perhaps not as intellectually driven as hers, helped the girl. She began to see clearly what she wanted.
She wanted not more knowledge, but ideas. Her connections with the students similar to her opened her eyes to something else she wanted more: opinion. She wanted to find her own thoughts on problems, for her mind was often riddled with facts rather than her own imagination. Suddenly, knowledge didn’t matter. She wanted to find the one thing she had a strong opinion about, or something that she would want to learn so much about that she could fight for it.
The girl then worked with her newfound friends and advisor to achieve such a goal, and over the course of the next semester, she made her decision and declared a major. Her deep desire for knowledge evolved into a desire to make a change in her new path.
You can decide what the girl majors in. You can put yourself in her shoes and have her major in what you are currently studying, or you can imagine her doing something completely imaginary or wild. If you are undecided like the girl was, just know that when you do register for classes, those classes don’t define you or what you will do in the future. This is your time to explore.
