Coming into college, many students have an idea of what they are looking to study, but that is not always the case. Many come into college thinking they want to study one field, and end up completely changing their minds and end their undergraduate career with a degree so different from what they imagined. Another group of students come to college without a single idea of what to study.

I personally have experienced the stress of finding a major that will suit me best. Coming into college, I was dead set on being a biology major on the pre-med track. By the end of freshman year, all that would change.

Once you grasp the higher level of difficulty of academics in college, you also learn that what you study can be made much harder if you’re studying something you’re not passionate about. I saw this firsthand.

After taking strenuous courses in biology and chemistry, I found myself with a lack of sleep and more importantly no desire to study either of these topics. I realized I wasn’t passionate about this subject at all, and it would make my journey through college that much harder if I continued on a path I didn’t love.

First swing and a miss gone, I entered my sophomore year at Loyola intending to go into the math and statistics field, but I was not entirely certain which one it would come down to. I set my heart on studying statistics, with an actuarial concentration, in hopes of pursuing and becoming an actuary. After taking an introductory statistics course, I learned this was not something I loved, yet again.

In my spring semester of my sophomore year, I decided to study math, with no particular concentration, and I really began to get in the swing of things and loved it. So with the scary deadline of choosing a major in my sophomore year swiftly approaching, I settled on being a math major with a pure math concentration.

I went into my junior year with high hopes, but strong anxiety due to my new heavy course load. It was brought to my attention that I could do an interdisciplinary major with math, because although I loved math, I felt like I needed something else to make me stand out. I looked into studying communications, and it turned out that it was something that I was really interested in, however would never get the opportunity to study it entirely in my final two years.

I am now officially an interdisciplinary math and communications major, with a math concentration in discrete algorithms and a public relations concentration for communications. It was a long road, but if you remain consistent on figuring it out, and always looking to teachers and the Career Center for help, you will be able to get there.