When I was 5, I wanted to be an astronaut. At the age of 8, I declared to my mother that I would be as famous as Demi Lovato, disregarding the fact that I could not sing to save my life. As my career aspirations went from astronaut to black hole specialist to journalist, I entered high school and got into the sciences. If someone looked at my high school transcript, they would assume that I was headed toward a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) major. They would be correct. In high school, I took advanced mathematics, chemistry and physics. I wanted to be a materials scientist. Back then, nothing excited me more than spending hours in a chemistry laboratory seeing what obscure material could oxidize lead.

When I arrived at Conn, I went to all the chemistry and environmental science presentations. That’s what I wanted to do, right? Apparently not as I was not excited about the presentations. To say that I was annoyed with myself would be an understatement. I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to reassess all my interests now. But, as registration for classes approached, I grudgingly looked at other subjects I liked. I was already in a First-Year Seminar that related to creative writing. I decided to add on Arabic (to fulfill Conn’s language requirement), a statistics class, and a comparative class. Fast forward to choosing classes for my second semester at Conn. That’s when I realized that I wanted to take those exact classes again. Thus, my classes for the spring turned out to be a fiction writing seminar, Arabic, International Politics and Macroeconomics.

I started noticing that whenever my family and friends would ask what I wanted to major in, my answer had shifted from “I don’t know” to “Probably politics.” By the middle of spring break, I realized that I had a new fascination when my best friend pointed out that getting push notifications from The New York Times and Foreign Affairs wasn’t something routine a college first-year did. I didn’t know for sure right then but by the time classes started up again I found myself at my International Politics’ professor’s office hours. In a meeting that was supposed to be about failed states, I ended up asking Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations Andrew Levin if he would be my advisor for my international relations major. I was ready to declare. Not even an hour after this meeting, I found myself declaring an applied statistics minor with Assistant Professor of Statistics Yan Zhuang.

I’m a person who likes to obsessively plan her life to a T. Hence, declaring a major and a minor appeased the restlessness I had been feeling since Orientation.