Your college plans can change (and that's OK)
When you get to campus, your goals and interests may change.
It seems like many high school seniors apply to college knowing exactly what they want to do or study. Maybe you, reading your screen right now, are one of them! For you, the job of picking a college or university is a little bit easier than students who haven’t a clue.
If you really love to play water polo, for instance, it’s relatively easy to search online and find a list of good water polo teams. Or if you know you want to be pre-med, you can compare schools’ acceptance rates to medical schools (though be careful of schools that inflate their numbers by weeding out too many pre-med students) or you can apply to a joint undergrad-medical school program.
However, many students have no idea what they’re looking for in a school. They don’t know what they want to study; maybe English or chemistry or phyllotaxis or all three. They like frisbee and love swimming, but don’t really want to be on a varsity team. So maybe they’re mostly looking at bigger schools in city environments where there are lots of opportunities for new experiences.
But whether you know what you want to do or not -- whether you’re focused on one ultimate outcome or pursuing many possibilities, whether you’ve done all the possible research or you haven’t -- be ready for surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant.
So it turns out the water polo club team is ranked No. 1 nationally, but the people on it this year just aren’t your cup of tea -- last year’s team was much more fun when you were visiting. And maybe the swimming pool is being renovated, so there’s a bus to another one, but it’s 20 minutes away and the art class you’re taking is waaaay more work than you’d planned on.
Whether you’ve visited all your top-choice schools five times each or not, things will be different by the time you actually attend. Both you and the university will have changed. And when you arrive on campus with your boxes and suitcases, and when you smile at your roommate or hallmate, your goals and plans will change some more.
And that’s not just OK, it’s what makes the college experience so enriching.
Even if the water polo team is no longer quite what you’re looking for, and if the swimming pool is too far away this semester, keep your eyes and ears open to what other students are doing. Talk to absolutely everyone you can. Oh, your school has a really fantastic writing program that you didn’t know about? Check it out! A classmate was offered a top-level internship at the White House? How’d she get that? Can you get it next year? Or maybe this serendipity is something so simple, so subtle, that you never would have researched it in the first place. Maybe it’s the dining hall’s gourmet coffee and its free access to Paste BN, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Whether you’ve carefully planned your college experience or not, be prepared for differences and deviations from the path. As Bilbo Baggins said, “There’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Miranda Forman is a graduate of Brown University, with an Sc.B. in cognitive neuroscience and honors in literary arts. Out in the real world, she spends her days mentoring aspiring college students with the team of consultants at Admissionado, a boutique admissions consulting company that specializes in helping aspiring students navigate the undergraduate and graduate admissions process. You need advice on college apps? College life? Scholarships? Miranda’s your girl.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.