A big reason why I chose Northwestern was because I knew I didn’t know what I wanted to study. As oxymoronic as that may sound—choosing somewhere because it is the best place for you because you don’t know what you want—it is absolutely true. I had no idea what I wanted to study, and Northwestern didn’t make me pick just one thing to study. The quarter system allows students to take more classes than the semester system. It’s kind of like a buffet; you can try a lot of things before deciding what you truly love!

Fall quarter of my first year, I began my buffet with Introduction to Sociology. My mom is a sociology professor, so I thought maybe it would be in my genes. I fell in love very quickly with sociology. Learning about how people’s social status affects their experience was very interesting to me, and the variety of classes the major required were expansive and touched upon a ton of different topics. This quarter, I am taking my last sociology class, a course where we conduct our own independent field research. I have loved every minute of going out into the field and practicing what it would be like to be a professional sociologist.

One thing I always felt I was missing with my sociology classes was some math. I took economics in high school and didn’t love it, but I thought I would see if a Northwestern professor could spark some interest in the subject for me. Spring of my first year, I took Introduction to Macroeconomics with Professor Mark Witte and was hooked. I just thought it was really cool using numbers to reach logical conclusions about a variety of things. I knew I loved economics spring quarter of 2016 when I took Economics of the Family. Applying economics to a subject I had studied a lot in my sociology classes was really cool to experience. Who knew there were actually numbers behind the arguments in those sociology papers?

Fall quarter of my third year, I decided to dip my toes in the world of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Again, this felt like a culmination of all my academic interests. We would take things we knew about people as they lived in the social world, and try to rationally think about how best to market goods to them. It was a really fun exercise! Last quarter, I wrote about arguably my favorite class ever, and if you read that article, you’ll understand how it is so easy to fall in love with IMC.

If you had asked me my senior year of high school what I would end up majoring in, I would have been speechless, but that is just why I picked this school. I knew I would not be forced to rush into anything, and just like going through a buffet line, I could taste a few things before having to decide what I loved!

“This picture is a throwback to my freshman year, studying up for one of our first economics exams!”