If I could go back, I wouldn't do it again
How do we grapple with having made the wrong decision?
I have lost count of how many versions of this I have written over the past three years. I have a folder full of what I considered the best attempts in my Google Drive. The first time I tried to write this was about three weeks after I graduated from university, in May 2019. I repeatedly tried throughout that summer to put onto paper what I wanted to say. Sometime around mid-October, in my first year of law school, I admitted defeat. I resigned myself to the reality that this was just not a story I would be able to tell. I moved on. I was busy with school and life, and I pushed my failure to find the words to the back of my mind. Then, in late February and early March 2020 - just before the world fell apart - I began to reconnect intermittently with fellow alumni from my alma mater. In these conversations, I started to conceptualize how I would eventually tell, not the story I set out to tell, but one I feel is much more important.
I chose the wrong undergraduate program.
I don’t remember exactly when I first admitted this to anyone outside my immediate family. I believe it was sometime shortly after starting law school. I know that once I said it, I felt liberated. Simply stating that I chose the wrong undergrad program for myself made my ability to reflect on that experience and interact with the parts of my life that remain tied to that program infinitely easier.
I want to be very clear about what I mean when I say that I chose the wrong program. I am only speaking to what was the best fit for me. While some of my experiences, positive and negative, are collective experiences shared by my entire class, most are personal. If you spoke to other members of my graduating class, you would likely hear very different stories. I would also never go so far as to say that everything about my undergraduate experience was terrible. It absolutely wasn’t. I had the incredible opportunity to live in six different countries, something that I will never be young enough or unattached enough to do again. I also had some professors with whom I felt a real connection and learned so much. To be very clear, this is not going to be a scathing indictment of my alma mater because my experience is (1) personal, and (2) as a member of the first graduating class, many of my experiences are no longer reflective of policies or programs at the university.
It is necessary, for this discussion, to distinguish between “wrong decisions” and “bad decisions”. Bad decisions are shoplifting, intentionally under-preparing for an exam, or not calling your mother, which correlate with adverse outcomes. Wrong decisions are more of a grey area. These decisions don’t necessarily carry any automatic negative repercussions, but if you could go back in time, you wouldn’t necessarily make the same selection. Here, I’m going to be talking about wrong decisions.
That I chose the wrong undergrad program was not some sudden revelation. I was unhappy with many parts of my undergrad experience from relatively early on, and for many different reasons that I’m not going to get into because they aren’t relevant. What I will say is that the most significant confirmation that I had chosen the wrong undergrad program came when I started law school. For four years, I had listened to faculty and staff talk about “finding your tribe”. I had watched my peers form deep bonds in a social environment where I consistently failed to find my footing. It wasn’t until I got to law school that I found what I could call “my tribe”. From there, I was able to see very clearly what I had always suspected: I was much better suited for a different university experience than the one I had opted for.
Over the last two and a half years, I have been open about the fact that I chose the wrong undergrad program. What has been most surprising, as a result, has been the reaction I have received for “coming clean”.
There have been no negative repercussions, thus far, for just admitting that I made the wrong choice for myself. The responses, even from my alma mater have been overwhelmingly positive and supportive. Being open about how my experience in that educational environment differed from my peers has provided a better foundation for us to communicate. All of this has made me wonder why I was so reticent to admit that I made the wrong choice.
I don’t believe I am unique in this behaviour. We make wrong choices all the time, or at the very least, I do. I take courses that I think I’m going to love and end up counting down the hours until they are over or refuse to put down a book that I’m not enjoying. I want to tell myself that making the wrong choice is part of the journey to making the right one. And sometimes it is. Other times I find myself trying to self-teach calculus.
Brene Brown, a vulnerability and shame researcher, talks about how the two most powerful words when struggling with something in our lives - a challenge we’re facing or a wrong decision - are “me too”. Something feels shameful about admitting that we made the wrong choice, especially when it was a massive choice like where we went to university.
If you’re feeling that way. I’m here to say, “me too”.
In a world where we strive to match our daily lives with the image of perfection we project on our social media, it is difficult to stand up and say that we made a decision and it didn’t turn out to be the right one. But that feeling, and I can say this from experience, goes away when we call a spade a spade and admit that it just wasn’t a good fit. All of the people we think will be so disappointed or shocked to hear that we made a wrong choice aren’t. They shrug it off with a simple “that’s how it sometimes goes”, because it’s true: that’s how it goes.
Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, the then-Dean of Faculty at my alma mater, once said that you couldn’t anticipate regret. The only way to know if you made the wrong decision about something grey, like where or when to go to university, is to make it and see what happens. While this is unfortunate, it’s also probably true. Before starting university, I had no way of really knowing what kind of experience I was looking for, and it wasn’t until I was in the midst of it that I realized it wasn’t the one I was having.
Walking away from big decisions is difficult. Deciding where to go to university is one of the most significant decisions you make early in life. I can still very clearly remember the flood of Facebook announcements about university acceptance from my senior year of high school. Where we go to university feels like this big, public proclamation that everyone counts on you to follow through on. I honestly can’t remember what a single one of those posts actually said. If I ran into any of those people today, it wouldn’t impact how I thought about them to hear that they started at one university and finished at another or didn’t finish at all. American universities lose around 10% of their enrolled students to transfers or drop-outs each year. There is nothing shameful or unusual about not graduating from the same university where you initially registered.
Don’t stress if you think you are at the wrong school or studying the wrong subject. Use it as a lesson in what doesn’t work for you. While I may still be too young and inexperienced to offer any great words of wisdom to a student trying to decide where to go to university, what I will stress is this:
I went to the wrong university for undergrad. I studied a very different major than I intended to. And I am completely fine. Just because I was at the wrong school or taking the wrong classes does not mean that I spent four years relentlessly miserable. I had some fantastic experiences, particularly travelling, that I am infinitely grateful for and never would have happened otherwise. What I studied in undergrad has had minimal impact on my life.
I made the wrong choice, but it did not set me on some collision course destined for failure. I am so happy where I ended up. I am at a good law school, and I am looking forward to articling with an outstanding law firm. I have amazing friends and professors. It took me a little longer than undergrad, but I found my tribe. Two and a half years later, going to the wrong university for undergrad doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
If you’re worried about making the wrong choice about university, or you think you might have already, you are not alone, and you should not be scared to admit that.