When I started college as a computer science major I wasn’t really committed to the idea of sticking with it. I’d taken one class in high school, which was pretty fun, but the idea of doing it for the rest of my life was still something I wasn’t entirely sure of. To me, college was the place where you were supposed to figure out what you wanted to major in, and I pretty much expected to change my mind at least once. I even chose UT because it was such a huge school, so there were a lot of options to switch out to.

But I never really changed my mind, and at this point I know that I won’t be. I’ve really come to love the major because of the opportunities it’s given me, including things like MAD, writing for this blog, getting to travel to tech companies and the many recruiting events that happen here.

Honestly, I still don’t know if it’s the “perfect major.” I might have been an incredible anthropologist, but by hanging out in GDC I missed my opportunities to find out. And of course I’d be feeling the same way if I were in anthropology, wondering about CS or any other major I could be doing.

But now that I’ve been here for a while I’m a lot less concerned with finding an incredibly precise definition of what I should be doing and more concerned with just doing things that I think are incredibly enjoyable, and I’m pretty happy with how that strategy is working out.

I’ve come to believe that any major you’re in is going to be what you make of it. I could spend ten years trying to figure out what I wanted to do, finally realize that it’s art, and then stress out for the next five trying to figure out which kind of art I wanted to do. In the meantime, I probably wouldn’t have accomplished much. Alternatively, I could just make something, and even if there were things about my creative process that I thought I should tweak a little, I would have actually accomplished something, and gathered more information about my future preferences without taking any breaks from productivity.

Of course it’s different it you start out in CS and then realize that you absolutely hate it and would have some kind of miserable existence if you stayed. In that case, yes, absolutely check out some other department. But if you can find bright spots in what you’re doing, there’s a lot of room to develop those into something even more fantastic, and living a life you’re very happy about.