What regrets do you have about your own college experience?

[Anonymous]

I wish I had gone to a school further from home where no one from my high school went.

I wish I went to a school where Greek life didn’t dominate the social scene.

I wish I picked a major I was actually interested in, as I never did anything with the very practical one I chose.

I wish I had found better friends and didn’t feel the need to drink so much all the time to feel like I was having fun.

[Anonymous]

I went to a school for the prestigious name that really wasn’t the best fit for me culturally and wholly unnecessary for the field I went in to. I should have gone to a less fancy/elite school that was a better fit for me.

[Anonymous]

I was and remain envious of overachieving pre-meds and medical doctors—even “lowly” family doctors—but it wasn’t ever in the cards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wish I had picked a more useful major than Communications.

May I pushback on this? I also chose an easy major — because it was easy and a match to my academic preparation at that point. Do you really think you’d be able to hypothetically handle something much harder, ie something with a lot of math and science? Unless you’re able to go all the way back to 9th grade, it’s unlikely. I would have loved to have been able to major in engineering, computer science or especially pre-med, but unless I have a time machine to re-do high school, that wasn’t in the cards at age 18, even with the benefit old age wisdom.

DP. There are lots of majors in between Communications and STEM subjects.

Agreed. I was one of the “easy major” kids, not because I couldn’t do harder work but because my big state school (and high school, and family) offered nothing by way of guidance on majors or careers so I stumbled around and fell into a path of least resistance. I don’t regret it for career-success reasons but for “poor fit” reasons. In later years I came across 3 or 4 other career choices that would have been a perfect fit to my strengths and interests. An “I guess I’ll do this because I’m not sure what ELSE I would do…” career doesn’t offer the same pleasures. (And of course I could always go back to school, but you reach a certain point of career success and experience where it would be highly impractical to burn than for might-have-been.)