What Am I Doing Here?

“Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.”

Robert Collier, American Motivational Author (1885-1950)

I’m a smart girl; there is no doubt about that. The transition from high school to college has been lot harder than I would have thought it to be. Don’t get me wrong, I was not expecting the transition to be a cake walk. But now that we are about a month into the first semester I start to wonder if this is really where I want to be and what I want to do with the rest of my life. It’s a lot of pressure being here at Concordia University. They hold their students on a pedestal and expect us to act accordingly. I like that, but I guess the stress levels have finally hit the high point in my life.

At my high school and throughout my entire life the adults around me always stressed being professional and specific. So that’s what I have been basing my decisions upon. And as I go through my classes here, I feel everyone else has had the same experiences. I don’t want to play the blame game and express what I really think about the topic of being a specific professional from the get-go. I do want to know what I am really doing here. I have been doing agricultural studies all of my life, mostly because I live on a farm and that’s what I am very accustomed to doing (also because I absolutely loved the teacher).But I never had the inkling to become a Veterinarian or really anything else in the agricultural. Yet I feel an attachment to it. But again, I love to help people, and I thought the medical field was going to be for me! I can withstand all the grossness that might come with it and I am intellectual. Perfect right?

Do I really know what I want to do with my life? Well the answer to that question today is no, I don’t know what I am doing here. I feel very overwhelmed and unsure of what I really want to do with my life. In some respects, I wish I would have had these feelings before I got to this state of mind. I am so very unsure what I want to do its kind of ridiculous. I don’t want to feel like a dummy in my classes and I really want to be happy. But I don’t think I really understood what I was dipping my fingers into until I finally got burned. But on any other day, the good ones that is, I am confident. Ready for whatever Concordia of Wisconsin wants to throw at me. I am invincible and really ready for being an Athletic Trainer. Like yesterday in class we were practicing special tests of the knee and I was just acing them. I could do it like a pro and nobody could make me feel any better or worse about my choice to be in the AT program.   

So here comes the real argument for you whom are reading this post: is declaring a major good for a freshman in college to do? Even if you are darned sure that’s what you want to for the rest of your adult life? Is it right for a freshman to be lost in the idea of “for the rest of your life”?

Looking back now, I was very confident in my decisions that I had made. I don’t think that they were bad ones either. I’m in a good institution, with good professors and good peers. But I feel choosing a major is too much for a student of high school age going into college to think about. The moving away from mommy and daddy and your family may be hard, but being independent in itself it a burden that is hard to handle. And you live in a new environment completely, have new people and new food (which trust me, is hard to get used to) around you is another category of stress in itself. So I think that colleges should stress more for incoming freshman to be undecided. Also, I think that colleges should have a freshman “experiences” program to explore more personally what you really want to do with your life. I think that there would be less confused and lost freshman and in general more confidence in the young people who will be running the world someday. Changing majors is put off as not a big deal. But it is, at least to me. I don’t want to feel lost, I want to know what is going on and I don’t want to play catch-up. It’s been said that college students change their major 2-4 times before they find what they really want to do. Is it that demanding to know what I’m getting into before I commit?