Sabina Leybold

 It starts when you wake up in the morning dreading your classes. Once you drag yourself there, you constantly check the clock. How could five minutes really be so long?

You look around at your classmates with disgust. They’re too competitive, too passionate about this field, too singularly focused. Why are they so obsessed? Why do they like it so much when you’re just going through the motions?

You take notes from PowerPoint slides, cram test material into your brain that you forget immediately after the exam, and can’t shake the notion that it’s pointless—you can’t actually do anything in this field until you go to grad school. These are all just prerequisite obstacles, the qualifying round for the real championship.

You deliberately chose to pursue speech-language pathology in school settings so that you can have the summers off to spend time on your real passions: writing and photography.

People scoff at the idea of being a professional writer.

They sarcastically retort, “Ha! Good luck.”

“That’s not a career!”

“You won’t make any money.”

“Better find a husband with a real job who supports that dream.”

You internalize that, so you choose a route that allows you to work with words all day, even if not in the way you’d prefer.

And then one day someone tells you that you’re too good of a writer to be a speech pathologist. Your resume and is entirely communications-related except for that one line: “Bachelor of Science in Speech-Language Pathology, expected May 2017.”

And you decide it’s time. Time to stop dreading everything. Time to choose a major that lets you do what you love every single day, not just during the summer months.

You meet with the department chair. “Have you taken any strategic communications classes?” he asks.

“No,” you say.

“How do you know you’re going to like this major, then?”

“I will, I promise.”

He signs the change-of-major form.

You leave his office feeling excited for the first time in months. You smile through your final weeks of your speech classes, knowing you’ll never have to learn about language disorders ever again.

 And you smile through the initial weeks of your graphic design class and your systems thinking class and even your intro to business class, knowing it’s exactly where you should be.