I always had the classic “I’ve wanted to be a vet since I was four years old” story. Ever since I was little, I’ve loved animals (and tolerated people), so I thought that being a vet was my calling. But, I had shadowed and worked in a couple of vet hospitals in high school, and, to be honest, I didn’t love it. However, I had my entire future set around the idea that I was going to go to vet school. And, I had convinced myself that vet school was what I wanted until the second semester of my freshman year at CSU, when I realized that wanting to do something since I was four years old probably wasn’t a good enough reason to continue down that path. At this point, I was a semester into the Zoology major and it was starting to feel a little too narrow, so I started to look at other majors.

I knew I wanted to stay in STEM because I enjoyed it more than liberal arts, but there are many STEM-related majors at CSU, so I went began looking through all of the majors and the classes that I would need to take in order to complete various majors. There were many classes I wanted to explore, but I also realized I would back myself into a corner if I chose a program that was too specialized in one field. That’s when I found the Biology major. What I loved about it was that I could take upper-division elective classes in different departments like Pre-Health, Behavioral Biology, Microbiology, and even Zoology. I felt that the major widened the scope of options for me so that if I wanted to go back to veterinary medicine I could, but I also had so many other options if I wanted to go in a different direction.

Since switching my major, I have had the opportunity to work in a teaching lab and in a microbiology lab. I’ll be honest — I am still unsure about what I want to do in the future, but biology has given me a solid foundation so that I have a lot of options for fields to go into, including such as research, medicine, and field work.