For the longest time I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I basically picked the major that seemed the least miserable for me, but recently I had like this sudden sway in my choice and I kinda think that it’s what I want to do with my life. I’m just unsure if it is because I had no idea for YEARS. Then I get this idea and it stays in my head 24/7 and I keep thinking about it and how I could do it. Is that what your decision for college is supposed to feel like?
I’d imagine the feeling of “knowing” is different for everyone. I’d also imagine that a lot of people never truly know if a particular major is the perfect one for them, depending on circumstances. Heck, for a lot of people their “perfect” major may not exist, or generally not be offered at their school.
I can tell you what my feeling was though. For reference, I came into college as a linguistics major, took computer science classes out of curiosity and ended up loving it enough to add it as a second major.
With linguistics, there was just a click. The subject came naturally to me (it still largely does), and I found my linguistics classes fascinating to the point where I was looking forward to every new topic. I also looked forward to doing the reading and the homework, because it was all so interesting! And periodically there would be something that interested me enough that I started reading more into it on my own time.
With computer science, there was the initial curiosity that lead to me intently researching more about what we were learning in the class. I thought the assignments were interesting, and started looking forward to doing them. I think the moment I fully realized that this was a good major for me though, was when I was looking through the syllabus for my third CS class and got super excited because it all sounded so cool and I was eager to learn about this stuff. And while this subject didn’t come nearly as naturally to me as linguistics did, I was willing to compensate for that and work at it until I had mastered a concept all because it was so interesting.
So for me a lot of it came down to actually looking forward to class, assignments, and readings, and doing additional reading in my own time when something specific caught my attention.