Debunking a Transfer Myth: Transfers Don’t Have Time to Change Their Mind

I have always known I wanted to be an English major, even when I had no idea where I wanted to go to college. Writing has been my passion since my days in middle school reading Nancy Drew and jotting down poetry in the margins of my notebooks. It also helped that I wasn’t very good at math and that while I found science really interesting, it endlessly confused me. Entering a university, though, wasn’t as simple as I thought it was going to be. Even before I knew I wanted to transfer to William & Mary, I knew that I wanted to study more than what the English department could offer. I took a few different classes at my first institution to see if anything interested me, and I ended up declaring a second major in sociology.

If you’re reading this and you already know me, you know that I’m not currently a sociology major. In fact, I have still only taken two sociology courses in my college career. After my move to Williamsburg, I started with another clean slate and had time to decide, again, what direction I wanted my education to go. A big myth about transferring is that you have to know exactly what you want to do as soon as you step onto campus, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth in my case. I took classes in economics, psychology, and geology and still didn’t find anything that I really connected with. But then I found another passion, completely unexpected: Russian history.

It’s always possible to look outside your comfort zones for other areas you’re interested in, and as a transfer you definitely still have time to do that! I will graduate next spring with a major in English and a minor in Russian and post-Soviet studies, and that’s something I never thought I would be saying three years ago.

-Emily Wynn ’17