Ask any college bound student what they want to be when they grow up and they will likely tell you they are undecided. Yes, undecided sounds so good that they all choose to use it and parents across America allow their children to get by with that answer. Why is that?
Choosing a college major is so difficult that many people find that they just aren’t up for the task their first year. Of course, after the first year, they choose to avoid declaring a major a second year and parents are dumb enough to pay for the expensive tuition while their student remains undecided.
If you are one of those college students who will enter into college as an undecided student, then do yourself a favor and only take core curriculum classes while you are undecided. This way your parents will get something for their education dollars and you will too if you are paying your own way through college.
For your first semester, take your core classes and be sure to test out of any classes you can by using the CLEP testing for class exemption. If you are strong in history or other areas then it is likely you can test out of a wide range of classes so that you won’t spend your time in a class you don’t need and your parents won’t pay for something you already know.
Your first college semester should be spent discovering where everything is on campus and hopefully, you will find the library as well as all of your classes by the time you have been on campus for at least a couple of weeks and hopefully, even sooner! You should set up a study schedule and seek help right away from your professors if you find you don’t understand the curriculum.
By the time you finish up your first college semester, hopefully you will have some direction as to where your life is headed and you will take the time to point it in a direction such as declaring a major. What’s the hurry, you might ask? What’s the reason for the wait? There isn’t any. If you are going somewhere with your life then you need to go somewhere with it and don’t put your future on hold while you discover yourself again and again. While discovering yourself is fantastic and you are expected to do that in college, you are supposed to discover yourself enough prior to college to know yourself and where you want to go with your education.
Choosing core classes for the first semester is fine and even for the second semester but by the end of the first semester of college you should kind of have an idea of where you want your education to lead you and by the end of your second semester, you should know where you are going with your life and with your education.
No one expects you to arrive on campus and know exactly everything about what you want for your future but you owe it to whoever is paying for your education to find out as soon as possible. You also owe it to yourself to take your education seriously. There be plenty of time for holidays later.
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