When I first started college, I was stubborn, didn’t change my mind, and not the greatest of students. I started my college experience off as a music elective major. Throughout that time, I convinced myself that music was the one thing I wanted to focus on and turn into a career. So, as one does with the want to turn music into a career, I spent times where I should have been in class or practicing by playing games with my friends and slacking off. I never thought as far as to changing my mind of my major.
It took me a year to realize that I needed to force myself to want to go to class and learn more about what I would eventually make my life after college. I worked hard to get into the music education department. But once I hit that goal, I slowly reverted to my tendencies of slacking off. It took until my fourth year and finally taking a course offered named Positive Psychology. Throughout that course, I finally began to notice all the signs of me not wanting anything to do with making music my life. But at that point, I had no idea what to do. By this point in time, I was a fourth-year music education major who was beginning the process of FATE, I would begin methods and then student teaching soon.
One last project in the class was to do something that would give back to the community or reinforce gratitude. I made it a goal for myself to stand out and devise an elaborate project that would be shown in every subsequent section of this course until the professor retired. From my mind, came the birth of the event Feed the Dino. Students could hop into a costume of a T-Rex and chase food around the academic quad just to have a release from their boring daily schedule. During the planning, execution, and recap of the event, I felt something that music school has never made me felt. And that feeling was true passion.
Here I am, a senior in college, approaching methods and student teaching with music, being torn to figure out what the hell he wants to do for the rest of his life. After speaking to many faculty, friends, and even complete strangers, I realized that it is one hundred percent okay for me to change my mind and go down a different path even if it will take me awhile to complete. Once I started taking courses that went towards what I wanted to do, I broke out of the trench I was in of skipping class and being a terrible student and changed into that student that you hate. You know the one I’m talking about. I became the student who has his unassigned assigned seat in the front of the room. No distractions and on the professor’s good side.
It is never too late to decide that the path you chose isn’t the one for you. Yeah, you may have invested countless hours of studying or practicing but that brought you closer to the understanding that you may or may not want to do that for your life. Your life can be filled with many hobbies and passions, but there is always that one burning passion that will hold your attention and take over, it just takes time to discover that. Never judge your success to others’ success, they may have found their passion early in life but not everyone has that luck, for some like us, we needed more experience in what we didn’t want to make this more worth it.
