A battle between my mind and heart.

 

I was never the type of student who could sit and stare at a text book for hours and try to remember all its content for an exam. Even the thought of opening up a text book would make me sleepy. In grade 8, I came out of the examination hall crying because I did horribly in my science exam. That’s when I decided that theoretical studies were not meant for me. I’d always enjoyed testing my mind as to how creative it could be, in every way that I could think of. Every form of art intrigued me and that’s when I decided that I wanted to make sure that whatever I did in the future it would have a creative aspect to it. My goal wasn’t to have a nine to five job after completing my studies but instead have something that I knew was made through the creativity of my own. But, that’s not exactly how it turned out to happen.

Moving forward towards college admissions, while applying to different colleges I looked for one resource that they may have and that was Fine Arts. At that time, I had made up my mind that I wanted to pursue media in university, so in college I would opt for fine arts and then go on from there. But the biggest mistake I made was that instead of looking at colleges and what they offered, I looked at where my friends were going and opted to go for the same college as them. The problem with that being that this college had no such thing as fine arts or any creative platform. But hey, I still went there because I wanted to be where my friends were and so I opted for Humanities. Right from that moment it was decided, not by me, that I will be studying psychology. As time rolled by, college ended and it was time to start applying to universities. I applied to two universities, Szabist for Psychology as that was what I was supposed to study and also to IoBM for media studies as a backup if I didn’t get into Szabist. A few weeks rolled by and I got an email from IoBM that I had secured a seat in the BS Honors Media studies department. And right after that, the next day I got an email from Szabist that I had secured a seat there as well for Psychology. Now you would think that I would have been happy and relieved to know that I had gotten into the university I was suppose to go too. But no, instead a battle of conflict started to form in my mind. On one hand I had gotten into media studies, something I had thought of doing until grade 10, but on the other the expectance of choosing psychology was also present. My heart already knew what it wanted but my brain would only scream back one thing to me and that was that I was expected to choose psychology over media as it could lead to a stable earning later on.

I spent the few days that I had to make a decision, asking the people around me as to what I should do, everyone had the same response; do what you want to do and what you know you can do. Subconsciously I was just hoping someone would just make a decision for me, I was completely torn. I decided to take the risk and go for Media studies instead of Psychology and now if I think about it, I do not regret my decision one bit.

What if I had chosen Psychology instead? Well, one thing I know for sure is that I would not have been happy with myself or with what I was studying. My grades would not have been good because let’s face it, I would not be able to understand anything that I was being taught, because now I realize that what I had been imagining Psychology to be like, it would have not even come close to it. I imagined having practical’s and doing tests on a subject, proving and disproving hypotheses. But, psychology in BA is a theoretical subject and thinking back to the condition my eighth-grade self was in, I know for sure that my grade would be low and so would my spirits. I cannot even imagine myself studying something like this, without having a passion for it. I would be disappointing myself and my family and that is not something I would want to do.

There might be moments where I have to hear the occasional “why did you leave psychology?” questions but at least I now would have valid answers to give and also be able to show my work and my grades to prove that what I am doing is really what I am passionate about and have potential of succeeding in this field that I have chosen for myself.