Senior year of high school, I was a daunted kid. Like many of you, I applied to a bunch of different colleges. Often older people wax nostalgically about how college was one of the most transformational periods of their life, which should have enlivened me at the time. It actually freaked me out – I had a feeling that whichever institution on my long list at which I ended up would forever alter my personality. I felt like I was teetering on the verge of going in a bunch of different directions, yet all the while I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted out of life.
Eventually all was said and done and I happily set my sights on Wesleyan. It was euphoric to have the uncertainty of the past year and a half replaced with excitement over the new and fascinating place where I’d be spending the next four.
Then came Summer Registration, and again I felt daunted. I didn’t have a specific career goal, so how was I supposed to know which classes to choose from all the options available? Sure, many of them looked interesting, but which ones exactly were the right ones for me?
All I knew for sure was what I enjoyed in high school. History and English were my favorite subjects back then. Part of me wanted to major in one of these, but I also had an idea that I might be just as interested in other areas in humanities and social sciences that didn’t exist to the same magnitude in high school.
After much soul-searching and perusing of WesMaps, I used Summer Registration as an opportunity to enroll in one course that was cross-listed as German Studies and Art History, and another course that was an FYI offered by the Philosophy Department. I reasoned that the former was a good choice because it would allow me to experience a taste of two humanities departments, while the latter was a good choice because Philosophy is considered by many to be both a humanities discipline and a social science.
After submitting my course rankings, I felt confident in my decision because I knew it was based on sound reasoning. I thought about what I wanted deeply, researched my options thoroughly, and chose carefully based on what was available. At the same time, though, I knew it was also based largely on intuition – my intuition as to what I thought I might like, based on experiences of related things I’d liked in the past. Of course, this meant my decision contained some uncertainty.
Yet rather than scare me, this uncertainty energized me once the gears were set in motion. Similarly to the way I felt when I learned I’d be going to Wesleyan, the intimidating notion of not knowing exactly what to expect was recast as an exciting adventure once my path was set before me. To me, this is part of the beauty of Liberal Arts – it challenges students to reason soundly but also to act boldly upon intuition, which makes life all the more interesting in its variability.
And in the event that you discover you don’t like your two summer registration classes…you still have at least thirty more to take before graduation. Which is another part of the beauty of Liberal Arts – it lends itself to experimentation.
While Summer Registration is past, I encourage you to go into course registration during orientation with a similarly thoughtful attitude. Asking important questions of yourself and thinking things through should give you the confidence to know that everything is going to turn out better than okay.
