The only time I’ve ever trusted my gut: college graduation reflections
I’m writing this immediately following submitting my last final exam of my undergraduate career. As long as I didn’t fail (knock on wood), I can now call myself a UCLA alum.
I’ve thought a lot about what got me to this point. Less so the time spent at school, but more the prior seventeen years of preparation and build-up that eventually dropped me on UCLA’s campus back in September 2017. In looking back, I’ve realized that my going to UCLA was one of the few times I’ve wholeheartedly clung to a gut feeling, a feeling that sustained for over four years of anticipation, no matter what obstacles arose.
I was 13 when I visited the UCLA campus for the first time. My mom and I tagged along on one of my dad’s business trips to Los Angeles, and on his day off, we thought it’d be fun for me to see the school.
(Before we get any further: this was not done in a helicopter-parent-tiger-mom way. If anything, I probably did my own research and took it upon myself to ask them if we could go. Growing up, for as long as I could remember, all I wanted to do was be in college. So that chain of events tracks. Okay, let’s continue).
I walked up the stairs from the parking garage and took my first steps on campus, in front of the Student Activities Center, to be exact. Upon my foot touching the pavement, I knew this was where I was supposed to go to college. I saw the hustling and bustling of Bruin Walk, the tens of thousands of students scurrying between Royce and Powell on the 50 of every hour, and the many taking to Janss for some much-needed relaxation between classes. I was envious, and I was determined. I had found my place.
The older I got, the more I stuck to my guns. After many serious conversations with my parents, who were understandably tentative about sending their only child across the country for four years, we reached an agreement. If I got in, I could go, no questions asked.
As the college application process got closer, there were a couple of questions I needed to answer:
- What was I going to study?
- Where else was I going to apply? As much as I didn’t want to say it out loud, I needed to prepare for the off chance of a small-means-bad-news-rejection envelope coming in the mail from my dream school across the country.
As I was looking into other schools and the programs they offered, I realized journalism was the path I should go down. I loved to write, I’d always wanted to work for a magazine, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else for four more intense years, so it just made sense. I began to look into journalism schools and programs at different universities (BU, NYU, Northeastern, to name a few).
When I looked into what my major would be at UCLA, I was dumbfounded. To my surprise, they didn’t have a journalism program. The closest thing I could get was a degree in communications, which, compared to the offerings at other schools, seemed to me like a lame excuse for what I really wanted to do.
What was I to do? My dream school didn’t have my major! No bother, 17-year-old me thought, I’ll just apply undeclared! Nobody sticks to the major they apply with. By the time I’m done I’ll probably have lost any sort of interest in writing, anyway. We all know how easily I get sick of things. Ha ha.
As you can guess, I got into UCLA. On a rainy night in March, after a long day at school, then lacrosse practice, then pit orchestra rehearsal, I was doing my routine post-shower-towel-sit, and happened upon UCLA Admissions on Twitter:
“Click here for your admissions decision!”
With shaky hands and my heart in my throat, I put in the application code I had committed to memory, waited a pain-staking 30 seconds for the page to load, and finally saw my acceptance letter. All it took was seeing the “C” in “Congratulations!” and I was sprinting downstairs, towel and all, jumping up and down in my living room screaming to my parents that I got into UCLA. The next day, I locked in my next four years via e-signature without hesitation. I completely ignored my brain and solely followed my heart, with full knowledge that the school didn’t have my desired course of study.
Fast forward four years later: after three identity-crisis-induced major changes, I have graduated with a degree in Political Science (don’t ask), and, wouldn’t ya know it, am still kinda into this whole writing thing.
So do I regret my decision? Should I have gone somewhere where the path to my degree was more easily etched out for me? Absolutely not. While I’m not walking across the stage to receive a diploma that reads “Journalism,” I still know that UCLA was where I was meant to be. My college experience has been entirely unique to UCLA: the people I met, the things I got to do, the places I got to explore. I wouldn’t have had any of the experiences I now cherish at any other school. Some memories warm my heart, others I can’t help but look back on and laugh at, but the piece that was at the center of all of them was UCLA. Without this school, those times would not exist. Sure, I would have had other experiences and made other memories, but they wouldn’t be the same, and in my heart, I know they wouldn't be as good.
The questions I ask now are how did my 13–17-year-old self know that UCLA was where I was supposed to be, and how did high school me let all other issues slide? Issues that, if they were to come up now, definitely would have stood in my way.
Above all else, I trusted my gut. I held onto the feeling I got when I first stepped on campus and I never lost sight of it. I can’t remember the last time I had a feeling that strong, and I’m so grateful that my younger self never let it go.
It should be said that I absolutely didn’t realize the weight of the decision picking which college you go to has when I was choosing. I’m now aware of how different things would be if I went to another school, and that somewhere in some parallel universe there’s a me that studied journalism at BU and is now living an entirely different life. But I’m grateful that I am the me that’s in this universe, and that I wasn’t aware of that intense trajectory when I was making my decision. I didn’t feel the pressure of my looming future on the horizon, and I was able to make the decision unclouded, solely based on what I wanted.
Obviously, I did not intend for my last year and a half at UCLA to turn out the way it did. What was once a campus buzzing with students 14 hours a day became a ghost town, used only as a loop for daily walks as an excuse to leave my apartment. I didn’t plan on my lower division game theory lecture I was half-listening to winter quarter of my junior year being the last class I’d ever physically sit in. Although I wish I got more physical time as a student on campus, I will always be proud of the work I did to reach this weekend’s milestone, even if the digitization of it all makes it seem like less of an accomplishment. But more on that another time.
When this is published, I will have already done my socially distanced walk across the graduation stage and received my silly little Political Science degree. I’ll have taken my last steps on campus as a student, and will forever be known as an irrelevant alumna. I’ll have the rest of my life on the horizon, and will actively be trying to channel my 17-year-old energy in deciding what my next move will be. If anything else, my college experience shows that following your gut pays off.
So thank you to 13-year-old Cassidy for recognizing a gut feeling and setting a goal for herself. And thank you to 17-year-old Cassidy for reaching it. And thank you to UCLA for the experiences, the people, and (obviously) most importantly, the education. Go Bruins!
