My 5-year-old niece stood at the edge of the ocean, yelling at seagulls as they divebombed the crabs left defenseless by the receding tide. “But Sarah,” I pointed out. “They have to eat something.”
“Why don’t they just eat chicken then?” she said, with the logic of someone who has not yet realized that the fluffy birds running around the barnyard and the meat on her plate were the same.
It’s a funny story, but it was also the start of Sarah’s quest to become a marine biologist. She raised hermit crabs, studied them, drew pictures of their various states. She spent hours staring into tide pools with a field notebook in her hands, and checked out so many oceanography books that the librarian began setting them aside for her. For high school, she applied to a school that offered an environmental engineering program, where she had several internships and was able to participate in marine research.
Over the course of her junior year, however, she was less enthusiastic about school, and stopped gushing about her research projects. And that summer, she finally admitted the truth: she still loved animals, but she’d lost interest in marine biology. She wanted to study art.
What seemed like an abrupt change startled us but really, why should it? Shouldn’t kids have the opportunity to fall in love with lots of different things before figuring out what they want to spend their lives doing? If you think about it, it’s sort of preposterous to ask kids no older than middle school to pick one thing and devote themselves to it throughout high school, with the idea of earning the opportunity to devote themselves to it for the rest of their lives. Of course, some kids do tend toward one thing – I decided I wanted to be a writer in third grade and, here I am, still writing. But many others try one thing and then another, take part in a wide variety of different experiences, are obsessed with something until they’re obsessed with something else. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! The problem comes when a good student wants to get into a top college and the wide variety of unrelated activities on their application somehow suggests they lack ‘depth.’
What should you do if, like Sarah, you change your mind junior or senior year, are tired of what you’ve been doing and want to do something else?
First: Remember that the application is not meant to sum up your soul! It’s a presentation of your experiences in high school. As long as you don’t make things up, you have the right to present what you want the way you want to. Just because you spent four years as first clarinet doesn’t mean you have to place it number one in your activities or have your essay center around music.
Second: Decide how to proceed. You can: a)Fill out your college applications as you originally planned, before your interests changed. This has the benefit of making you look like a strong, focused candidate with concrete evidence to back up that claim.
Overall, for many students this isn’t a bad option. One potential problem is that some schools – particularly large universities – make you declare a major when you apply and it may be difficult or even impossible to transfer to a more competitive major later. So definitely check what’s required to study the major you want at any university you apply to. In addition, a lack of enthusiasm for the theme of your application may make it difficult to write compelling essays.
A second option is to b)refocus your application, using aspects of your high school career to show that you’re actually a strong candidate for your new area of interest. For example, I had one student whose courses and activities all focused on health care – but she decided as a senior that she wanted to study economics instead. Her discovery that she was far more passionate about the spreadsheets she made for her science clubs than the clubs themselves served as the basis for a powerful essay highlighting her skills, self-awareness and flexibility.
Sarah was able to take her long history of sketching the animals she loved and argue that she was interested in developing graphics that would make cutting edge biography more accessible. She was accepted into her top choice college with a hefty amount of merit aid. (Once there, she discovered her talent for organization and ended majoring in something that had nothing to do with either art or marine biology, evidence that we can, all of us, reinvent ourselves as often as needed.)
Of course, you may figure out other options for yourself – I have additional ideas, but as usual this post is getting too long. Maybe someday I’ll reinvent myself into a writer of concise but informative blog posts.
Okay, that last might be a particular unlikely reinvention.
Strike the Write Note 