Educational Reflections

My college experience is almost over but I feel that I’ve learned more than just academics in college. I have learned more about me than anything. I went into college green and a little naive to what was expected me. I had my own visions and goals of who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my life. I might have under estimated how much college would impact me. College can be the greatest years of your life or the worst depending on how you meet the challenges it presents and I can’t say that it was a bad experience at all.

I’ve made a couple of mistakes when it comes to what I wanted to be professionally. I didn’t realize what I wanted and where I wanted to be because I didn’t know myself as well as I know myself now and that is what I take away from college. I had fluffy thoughts of how awesome it would be to be a doctor, to examine the human body, to maybe cure cancer. I had big dreams, really big dreams, but no sweat, I can do this, yeah. That was a joke, I underestimated the biology program and completely misunderstood what it was for.

I thought it would be a cool course to take and while I had an idea of how hard it was I realized I wasn’t invested in the field itself. It wasn’t for me, I wasn’t the number cruncher or the person who could sacrifice hours of her life to studying science. I didn’t like it all and that was a problem. I went into college not understanding me and so I began to flounder.

After coming to Stony Brook I began to realize that the problem wasn’t my major but me. I didn’t want to learn this. I’m the person that has to be interested in what I’m learning to succeed. I can’t just pick up anything and love it. I switched my major. I went into philosophy and I found my niche. All my friends think philosophy is dry and boring. I’ll admit there were a couple of times I got bored, but I really liked what I was learning so I tried harder. I wanted to understand the material. I began to learn about social contracts, and about human nature, and moral standings, also politics. I liked to debate about arguments and whether they were valid or not or why some people had these views with friends and family. It was a lot of fun.

It was then that I realized that I didn’t want to be a doctor. Philosophy had the perfect proportion of all the things I liked. While I still liked math and science I didn’t want to study it. I wanted to learn about it. This may seem like the same thing but it isn’t. I wanted to know the theories involved in scientific thought and mathematical data. In fact many philosophers were actually quite savvy in both fields of math and science so it wasn’t a total loss. I could still keep some of the material I had learned from biology I just didn’t have to know it in depth. Furthermore because I was learning all these political things I began to look at law. The funny thing was as I was talking about this at school I began to realize that this was all I would talk about at home as well. My mother and I would have intense debates about why certain laws were going into effect or big cases that were in the news. We talked about the typical, abortion, women’s rights, welfare, health care, Casey Anthony and Travon Martin to Bill Clinton’s Impeachment.

I needed to make the switch and I’m glad that I did now. College isn’t just academics but an experience for yourself. Yes, I made some mistakes but I don’t regret all of them because in the end I learned something important about me and that’s what counts the most.