My3YearsatGustavus
- 1.
I actually never made up my mind to come to Gustavus till the last minute, on the 1st, about an hour or so before the
national deadline. Originally, my plan had always been to go into the Army, or the F.B.I. Beyond that, I had a whole
scattering of other potential careers ideas; park ranger, cook, commercial fisherman, private military contracting.
Surprising even myself, I bypassed all conventional choices, and opted to go to GAC.
While I was initially indecisive about my decision, the moment I committed myself, I had no doubts about what I
wanted to do. After 4 years of just being a number in high school, I didn’t plan on flying all the way out to to Minnesota
just to fade into the background yet again. I wanted to do big things, crazy things, and I wanted to do them my way,
with a big T in front and and a bold N at to cap it. At first, I thought I might achieve this through the study of history, a
subject that I had enjoyed very much in high school and one that I had excelled at. Yet by doing so, I didn’t want to
sacrifice my language studies of Japanese and Spanish, because I knew that without practice, I’d forget most of what
I had previously learned. Besides this, I was also interested in exploring several other subjects like Economics,
Psychology, Geography, and Sociology. In short, I had many subjects that I liked and I didn’t know which to major in.
My first solution therefore, was to try and do them all. After my first week, I conjured up a 4 year plan including a triple
major of History, Japanese, and Spanish with a double minor in Business and Psych.
About halfway through my first semester, I quickly realized that there were some serious flaws in my strategy. First
off, only about 71% of the required classes for my majors were classes that I had any interest in taking. ( I know
because I tallied them.) While Cuban History and Modern East Asia sounded brilliant, I was not so psyched about
having to take Mayan Art or Intercultural Relations through Film just so that I could graduate with a “major” in the
field. Furthermore, I found that there were some pretty serious institutional obstacles that prevented me from
achieving my multidegree goal. A GPA dependent course credit cap hampered my abilities to take more than 4.75
credits at a time. Certain classes had to be taken before others, despite the fact that these prerequisites were only
offered once or twice a year, creating scheduling bottlenecks.
After spending a frustrating second semester trying to survive classes I was only marginally interested in, I came to
some important conclusions.
From now on, I will only take classes that I want to take, regardless if they are part of my major requirement or not.
By the same token, don’t take classes just because you have to for your major.
You don’t have to receive a major or minor to learn about the things you love. While it certainly helps to be in an
environment of higher learning, you can learn vast amounts by yourself. A sizable amount of the learning thus far in
college has been on my own anyway.
4 years is an incredibly short amount of time. Make the most of it.
While simple, these edicts seemed like revelations to me, and I took them to heart. I dropped my triple major to one,
and quit registering for the classes that I was not absolutely psyched about. Instead, I signed up for a whole new
variety of clubs and classes, centered around exploring the subjects of my previous minors. If I couldn’t fit the classes
into my schedule, I audited them, or dropped in on the units that interested me the most. I used my summers to
taking classes at my community college, bypassing the bottlenecks which had given me so much trouble at
Gustavus. With my spare time, I even started a book trading business, where I had blast running my own business,
and through which I would eventually meet one of my best friends.
