Freshmen at Large - Stephanie Hodges

I’m so confused. Do I want to be a journalist, a physical therapist or a 1st grade teacher? I know everyone tells freshmen not to worry about their major because the average student changes their major at least five times, but I’m up to about 10. I keep going back and forth. I’ve had to realize that I need to resist the urge to go to A&M’s website to discover other majors. Aside from Facebook, scrolling through course descriptions and degree plans takes up a majority of my online time. I promise I’m not just some nerdy girl who runs home, switches on the computer and spends her entire night discovering potential careers. I just get so insecure about my major/majors that I can’t make up my mind.
I’ve always loved to write, and forever I wanted to write for a health and fitness magazine. But do I love health and fitness more than writing? Would I rather instruct people in fitness than write about it? Could I be a doctor? A children’s doctor? Well, kids are fun, but it would be sad to do surgery on little kids, so maybe I should be a teacher. This cycle continues from biomedical science to Spanish, psychology to business. I’m glad of one thing though. I am definitely not a math person, so as I’m browsing through these potential majors, I never think to myself, “Oh my gosh, I love electrical engineering,” because I don’t. Physics was my first C in high school, and I worked to get it.
Most of the time, the decision I make to switch majors is spontaneous. I will be somewhere, for example, my “Diseases of the World” class, and in the middle of Dr. Tizard’s lecture on the invention of the smallpox vaccine, it hits me. I want to be a virologist. How amazing would that be? I’d get to wear one of those sweet blue body suits and go through 10 biohazard levels to get in and out. I could be like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak” and save an entire Californian community from a deadly virus. Or, I could be like Richard Preston and write a book on Ebola, which later would be made into a film that I could direct. Of course, then I’d have to major in English, minor in film studies and have a fairly decent amount of knowledge of infectious diseases.
Oh well, whether it’s agricultural science or Russian that I decide on, I still have one more semester to figure it out. If not, victory laps are pretty sweet.