Ever since I was able to write, I loved to fill journals with fictitious characters and create booklets of information with paper leftover from my dad’s office. I would always answer “writing” when people would ask me what my favorite thing to do was.
Senior year of high school, I took a creative writing and expository writing class, which ended up being my favorite classes from all my high school years. I was able to write pieces I had never tried writing before and learn how to form different sentence types and avoid passive voice. Graduating from high school, I felt confident in my choice to go into professional writing as a career. I mean, it was something I had always loved, right?
As I went through different classes my freshman year, I started to question if I was fit for the major I had always dreamed of going into—PWID. English Grammar was a challenge, and I thought that maybe I wasn’t as good at communicating the English language as I thought I was. I enjoy writing more than editing, so Professional Editing class didn’t thrill me. I felt like I struggled to comprehend the concepts that were taught to me in Production Tools, a class that taught the basics of Adobe products. Through these struggles, I was starting to wonder if I had picked the wrong major.
In April of my freshman year, I had the opportunity to go on our major’s annual spring trip. We went to Nashville, Tennessee and visited two marketing and advertising companies to learn about possible careers we could pursue one day. We toured JumpCrew first, a marketing and sales firm. I was encouraged to see a fairly young group of employees and an innovative concept for increasing company sales. The company implemented brand awareness, SEO, and email marketing in their writing work. I knew that this type of business would be somewhere I would be interested in working in the future.
We also went to Lewis Communications, a marketing and digital communications firm. They focused social media management, content marketing, email marketing and content strategy, all things that excited me.
These real life companies that implement skills we learn in the classroom every single day encouraged me that I was still in the right major. All of the doubts in my mind were reassured. After going to Nashville, I felt a lot more confident in choosing PWID and in the skills that I was learning. It also opened my interest more to the marketing side of my major and all of the cool employment opportunities that would be available with that route. Although there have been classes within my major that haven’t been my favorite, they have led me closer to defining the path that I want to pursue in the future.
So, I’m thankful for all the doubts and questioning. They’ve allowed me to become more confident in my major, and they’ve allowed me to focus on what I am truly passionate about.
