I’ve been having a conversation lately with juniors about how they figure out what they want to do with their lives and what to study in college; I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts with you. The beauty of the American collegiate academic system is that, unlike many European universities that require you to decide what you’ll do for the rest of your life at the age of 17 years old, here you can take some time to check out your options. For the first two years of college, most students don’t declare their major, in fact, the most popular major for incoming freshmen is “undecided.” It’s in the last two years of college that your focus is narrowed down, it’s in the first two years when you explore.

Many Liberal Arts centered colleges help you explore by creating a series of requirements that make you experience different disciplines that you might not necessarily have chosen on your own. By taking “General Education” requirements, or “Core Curriculum” classes, you will have a chance to taste ideas that you never would have imagined before college. And, where you know you are passionate or are intrigued, explore even more. Required classes are only a portion of your schedule in college. Follow what you like, what you feel inspired by, and one of two things will happen – you will discover your calling and pursue it or, at the very least, you will become a strong critical thinker who can apply those skills to practically any job after college. The most important thing is to test yourself in college – risk taking classes you don’t know if you’ll be good at, take a class because you’ve heard that the professor is amazing. If you want to be a doctor eventually, but you love art, be an art major – you can do that and take all the required pre-med courses; medical schools love to have students who are well rounded and not so driven that they didn’t take the time to try out different things in college. In fact, medical school (or law school or business school) is so single-mindedly focused on medicine (or law, or business) that students who have tested out the range of possibilities prior to pursuing a professional degree are more highly sought out because they are less likely to burn out.

The point is, right now you don’t have to know what you want to be when you grow up. Invest your energy into deciding the kind of person you want to be, what your principles are, what you stand for? If you want to be a person who wakes up everyday excited to go to work, then you’ve invested the time into getting to know yourself well enough to pursue a career that will inspire that reaction. Look for your calling, and it will find you. And, if you do know you want to pursue a more particular field of study, that’s great. Pursue it by finding colleges or universities that have those specific programs. You might even change your mind which is ok too – most students change their major three times throughout the course of their college career.

But, today begins the rest of your life. Today is when you take advantage of the opportunities you have. Today is when you decide if you are a person you are proud of or a person who needs to make changes in order to be a person you are proud of. In the end of your life, it will never be about what you did for a job, but the person you were in course of the doing. And that person is a person you choose to be today.