The Hardest Decision I’ve Ever Made by Spencer Price
Life on the Hill: Bison Blog
Changing your major isn’t something you ever consider when going into college. In my senior year of high school, on priority enrollment day at OBU, I enrolled in the College of nursing. I was so excited to go to OBU and study nursing, but if I’m being honest even then I did not know entirely what I was getting into profession-wise. Over the following Summer I realized I didn’t have a plan on what I wanted to do. For the lack of a better plan, and not wanting to be behind, I didn’t change and started in nursing. I quickly was brought into the fold of the ‘stressed out-too busy-nursing students,’ who are actually a much friendlier group than they sound. Just as a troupe of soldiers growing closer together because of war, the difficulty of being a nursing major brought us all closer together. We encouraged each other to keep pressing on, to have a better work ethic, to love others more, and these valuable lessons and the valuable people who taught them kept me going. Junior year coming in hot, I knew I still wasn’t sure if I should change, but I decided getting hospital experience the next fall would be a make or break, and that it was worth going for. Unfortunately, it was a break for me.
Then began the six-week process on what I should do. Before I had my entire vision that I was going to be Nurse Spencer, I was going to make ‘x’ amount per year, I was going to work this job, etc. I got all caught up in the decision process on questions like, “how would I support myself?”, “was I going to do graduate school?”, “was I going to graduate on time at all?”, “was the major I was thinking about doing something other people wanted me to do?”. I fled to every professor and friend of different majors I could talk to just wanting someone to tell me what to do. It took my closest friends and mentors to really get me to ask the only question that mattered: what do I want to do, and do I trust God with that? I finally landed one day before enrolling for spring in the college of business pursuing a degree in business with an emphasis in marketing.
Leaving something you are comfortable with and have been in for 2 ½ years is not easy. The friends and professors I’ve come to know and love has been the hardest part about making the switch. I rest in the truth that God has a plan for my life – a plan which involves pursuing a different ministry than I intended. I also reside in knowing I’m in the best place possible changing majors where I don’t have any fears of a decline in quality because of the high quality of all of OBU’s colleges and professors.
The moral of my story is to not fear change. Changing majors is a very common practice in college these days, and that’s not a bad thing! College is all about figuring out who you are in a community with others your age doing the same thing. Changing your major is a regular, even natural part of the process. Even then, having a college degree will open you up to so many opportunities you never even thought of. The key is taking the step. My brother, who did a 180 life change after figuring out his degree wasn’t what he wanted to do, shared a quote with me from Wendell Berry and I thought it appropriate to share the quote again here:
“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.”
My best friend who also changed his major said to me, “there’s a kind of humility in failing.” Lots of us have some kind of concrete vision on who we’re going to be: what vocation we undertake, what age we get married, how many children we have, etc. We have these dreams of who we’re going to be. But if we trust God and embrace what He has in store for us, possibly revising a new draft for our life plans if we need to, I believe that we will find the person we become being greater than the person we dreamed of being.
Life on the Hill: Bison Blog
