Transferring back to UMass was one of the best decisions I've made my whole college career. At first, I came in to Amherst bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to experience a new start to life. Cut to my spring semester, where I was knee deep in essays and assignments with no light at the end of the tunnel. I was feeling incredibly uninspired and disillusioned with the way my major was going. I had contemplated switching majors or even taking a gap year, but I had already taken on loans and I could not start paying them off so suddenly. So I made the decision to transfer to UMass Lowell and become a double major in Criminal Justice and Business, with an idea of maybe adding an English major in there somewhere. After a semester, I was done with Lowell. It felt like such a difference in environment compared to Amherst. In Amherst I had my dorm in a nice quiet area with a big library open at all hours of the week.
At Lowell, the campus was interwoven in a busy city, in a not so nice neighbourhood. Additionally, I was not enjoying my new majors at all either. Choosing your major is one of the toughest decisions a college student has to make. Sometimes you genuinely have no idea as to what you want to do once you graduate from college. I jumped from major to major and from this school to another and back again. I've been (in no particular order) a criminal justice major, a psych major, an english major, a business major and a Spanish major all in 4 years of college. Business was boring, criminal justice was depressing and psych was great until my chosen path (BS in Psych on a neuroscience track) required too much math for me to be able to handle. After many tears, sleepless nights and hours spent in professors office hours, I realised that I needed to study something that I enjoyed or I was going to burn out- and fast. Language has always been something I excelled in, regardless of what it was. I knew from my previous experiences in other majors that I enjoyed helping out other people in real time. Interpreting seemed like a good choice- I had already been doing it for most of my life. Unfortunately, I cannot put down doctors visits and parent-teacher conferences under the "experiences" part of my resume. I chose Spanish mostly because I had a working knowledge of it. I could write, read, and speak it, but all in very casual, non academic settings. So I decided that that was what I wanted to do. Transferring back and forth between UMass schools was easy, but making friends each time was difficult, especially when you're shy. I decided to step out of my comfort zone and join a sorority. Neither of the UMass schools do much to make the transition from school to school easier, so I definitely recommend joining some sort of of club or RSO.
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