Let’s be honest. We were all, at one point or another, sitting there and thinking, “What the heck am I gonna do for the rest of my life?” I know I was. In fact, it took me months to decide, like I’m sure it did for many others. Stepping into the college life is one of the largest steps we take in our lives. It’s not something everyone gets to do, and we’re reminded every day how many people don’t make it through all the way. For a lot of us, myself included, we’re still sort of unsure how we want to play our lives. We’re making a huge decision: the course we want to take for years to get a job in the field we want to spend the rest of our lives in. 

That said, there are still quite a few freshmen who are undecided and haven’t quite picked a major. To those freshmen, I say the time is now. Now is the most optimal time to plan ahead and narrow down your course path. I understand it may still be very tough to decide, so we’ll use myself as an example of how to lay your plan down.

For me, I kind of knew what I wanted to do from a young age and that was game design, plain and simple. But, it’s more abstract than that. Every type of art form is required to make a game, so I chose to take the path that would lead to the bulk of it: computer science, learning to code. That wasn’t to say that was my first option. I’ve earned myself a knack for art, and wanted to initially do more artsy things in the field but that just wasn’t the optimal path for me. I kept looking, and after taking certain classes in high school, I found how much I enjoyed coding, at least when the code doesn’t fight me. Then I weighed that against everything else, and in the end, that’s what I wanted to do more. 

Through that, comes questions everyone has to ask themselves when deciding what they want their major to be. “How do I know this is the major?” “Do I want to do this more than that?” “Is this really what I want to do for a career?”

As soon as you can answer those questions, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to do. Picking your major is never easy, and it’s really easy to get stuck thinking about all the what-ifs and the maybes. You can’t let that get in the way for too long. To all of those students who are still undecided, it’s high time you ask yourselves those questions and really take the time to form a solid answer for yourself. Priority registration is this week, and you need to be ready to make a good and informed decision because this decision is going to affect the rest of your life.