This past week I have been reminded through a multitude of means about the power of our choices and the monumental affect that they have on the course of our lives. Especially now, in this tiny age window of 18-22, the choices we make and how we react to the things that happen to us, will shape who we become. If you strip away every thing else, college is a time of change. I always thought that by the time I was in college I’d have my whole life figured out. I’d know who I was and where I was going. In the past year and a half I’ve learned that the only true thing I know is how incredibly wrong that assumption was.
At 18 as a high school senior, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted out of my college experience. I thought with such certainty that I would still maintain a friendship with all my friends from high school. I thought sorority life was the end-all-be-all of the college social sphere. I thought I’d major in Biology and become a vet. In all honesty, I thought that high school was the hardest life would get. And I was wrong.
Back then I couldn’t know what I know now. I couldn’t know that choosing a large school because that’s where all my friends were going, would turn out to be a wrong decision. I couldn’t know that no matter how much I loved my friends, college would change me, and change them, and that change would pull us apart. I couldn’t know that sometimes the Greek system doesn’t turn out the way you think it will. And I couldn’t know that, as it turns out, I hate the medical world and being a vet is not in my cards. There’s so much I didn’t know. So much that I banked my college hopes and dreams on, and when that all turned out to be wrong, I was faced with an even harder choice: rerouting my life.
I’m not the kind of person who takes well to change. I like knowing what to do and how to get there, with all of my variables accounted for. Making big choices is hard, especially when there’s no way to know the outcome, but somehow I did it. I made the choice to transfer to Furman. I joined clubs, I spoke up in class, I talked with my professors, I chose two majors, I applied to study away, I went through the rush process (again), and now I’m looking into research and internship opportunities. One choice. That’s all it took, and now I’m on a completely different path. Even though I still have setbacks, and there are days when I think about how different college would have been if I had chosen correctly the first time around, I wholeheartedly believe that I’m where I’m supposed to be.
My hope in writing this is that I can reach out to prospective Furman students, whether they are in high school or are looking to transfer from another college or university. I want you to know that there is no right and wrong in deciding on a college, there are only separate paths and eventually you’ll find your own. I said before that college is a time of change, but it’s also a time of adapting. You have to find a balance between high school friends and college friends, between different aspects of your social circle, in your academic realm and in your life in general. Of all the things I didn’t know in high school, that’s the one thing I wish I had known when I was 18.