Written by Lauren Smyth
I had no idea what I wanted my college experience to look like, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from my entrance essays and pre-college planning. On the docket was majoring in political science (nope), learning a fourth language (not yet…), and focusing exclusively on academics rather than taking a part-time job (coffee is expensive).
Three years later, I’m majoring in economics, running a podcast about English grammar, and working two writing jobs. To quote Allen Saunders, a famous American cartoonist: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” And there is a lot of life to be lived at college.
Flexibility is both the greatest gift and the greatest challenge of these four years. On the one hand, it shows you’ll never know yourself quite as well as you think you do, which can be a disappointing and even frightening realization. But it also gives you opportunities to get to know yourself, to discover what you’re passionate about, and to pursue new and updated dreams.
I’m one of those people who likes to have a two-year plan. It goes something like this: “Year One: Take these ten classes at these times of day with these professors. Year Two: Get a job for this salary, working with these people, at the intersection of these two specific streets.” And so on. But the real world is rarely so predictable. Now that I’m learning to live in the moment instead of two or three years in the future, I’m much more comfortable with that fact.
Just leaving home for more than two months at a time—the very first thing you do when you come to college—is an enormous novelty for most of us. But the change won’t stop there. Data from the Department of Education shows that about 30% of students change their majors—the whole reason you’re in college—and 10% do it more than once. The National Center for Education Statistics puts that first number even higher, around 80%. These numbers prove that there’s nothing abnormal about undergoing major (pun intended) and scary adjustment. Everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s getting through it.
The key to staying sane in the face of upheaval is realizing that your previous plans were made with the knowledge you had then—knowledge of yourself, of the world, of the avenues that were available to you at the time, etc. Revising your plans means that you know more now and have the opportunity to make a better decision than you would have with what the “old you” knew.
I never thought I’d come to love radio broadcasting, for example, or that I might make a career out of it. Hillsdale College’s WRFH Radio Free Hillsdale taught me that only because I wearily consented to attend the info session out of mild curiosity and perhaps a dash of parental encouragement. (Get out there! Try new things! Four years seems like a long time, but it’s not … and they were right about that.) Now I know I would have missed out had I stuck to my original plan. Maybe it was a little hard to admit how wrong I was. And maybe I’ll be doing it again in a year or two, looking back at this article and shaking my head from my seat in flight school or behind a teacher’s desk. But if “current me” could see that future, I’d get excited about it. I’d know I discovered something new about myself, something I’d come to love.
Even if you don’t change your major, and you somehow manage to execute your plan perfectly, the goal of college should never be to make yourself conform to a structure you created when you didn’t know all the options. Instead, hold plans and schedules loosely. Look out for and seize the chances you’ll receive. Welcome true and tested discoveries that uproot what you thought you knew. It’s not just OK. It’s good. It’s all part of rejoicing in the face of unexpected challenges, and it will help make your four years at Hillsdale College the best they can be.
Lauren Smyth, ’25, is a prospective political economy major and French minor. Outside of starting arguments in philosophy class, she enjoys curling up on a bench outdoors (sun, rain, or snow) to write novels or articles for her blog, www.laurensmythbooks.com.
Published in June 2023
