If someone had told 12 year old me that I would be getting my bachelor’s degree by writing essays on The Princess Bride, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I would have been so excited and happy about future me that I would have burst and my brains would have leaked out of my collapsed form.
Okay, admittedly Spider-Verse hadn’t come out when I was 12, but that’s besides the point.
The point is, that in college you can legitimately study what you want to. The freedom is intoxicating.
There’s a couple roundups throughout your entry into college, and eventually they’re going to show you a long seemingly exhaustive list of Majors for you to choose from and ask you to tick a little box next to the discipline that you want to study.
For me, it felt like a massive decision, that thing that teachers had been building up to since third grade when I was first asked to think about my future. I was terrified of ticking the wrong box, falling down a path of misery, and one day waking up in a terrible office job that I would shake my fist at and whisper: “If only I had studied a different major.”
The truth of the matter, of course, is that there is no wrong major to study.
That’s it! For real! There’s no pressure!
To a certain extent, college is all about finding yourself and doing so through academics. General Education classes can be boring or seem unnecessary at times, but they are a great opportunity for testing the waters and seeing what you really jive with. Take a math class, a performance art, and a geography! You may take a shining to it without ever realizing it.
Quite literally, I decided that I wanted to study Communications because I liked to talk to people. I liked it, thought I was good at it, and I knew that I could be better at it. I hemmed and hawed about changing my major or exploring elsewhere for my first couple years, but then as we got further and further in the course, I found I got more and more interested in it!
I started to pick classes that interested me, and I got more and more narrowed into the field and genre of academia that I really loved.
Let’s be fair here, for these final papers, I didn’t write down “The Princess Bride is the best movie of all time” over and over until I had filled up 15 pages, I took what I had learned from my professors and textbooks and applied it to the things I loved.
If you look at good old Princess Bride from one angle, you can see how the representation of hypermasculine characters that had soft sides influenced what I perceived as my ideal gender performance. If you look at it another way and juxtapose it to more modern films like Spider-Verse, you can see how cultural ideals around relationships, identity, and classism have changed and altered one another according to each film’s respective era.
I could have just written a paper on my gender development. And I could have just written a paper analyzing cultural ideals changing over time.
But would I have enjoyed that? Would I have cared? Would I have put even half as much effort into those papers than I did?
No. So I incorporated my favorite movies into the papers instead.
Did I know before going to college that I adored the theory of Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm and Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance?
Of course not.
I love stories, and I went to college specifically so I could advance my skills and be able to get jobs around the things that I love. I learned later about what I could dig into in school to better understand those stories and develop real-world skills to change and clarify my world views.
But I never lost that initial love and interest. So, today, I write my papers on the stories I love, and yet still prove that I’ve been paying attention for the last four years through that by talking about all the stuff I’ve learned.
I have friends and peers that are writing their final papers on non-traditional pregnancies in the TV show Friends, Shia LaBeouf’s performance art, the K-Pop industry, and first-generation college students representative of minority groups and their unique struggles.
Everyone is choosing things that they love, everyone is studying things that they love, and they’re proving that they can do a gosh-diddly-darn good job of it.
College is about a lot of things. Self-fulfillment is one of them. You don’t have to have a passion figured out, you just have to have an interest and a willingness to experiment, and soon you’ll be learning about what you love!