I went into college not knowing what I wanted to major in. That kind of thing is fine, as long as you figure it out a semester or two into the degree. I didn’t figure out what direction I wanted to go until I started running out of general education classes and had to decide what to start concentrating on. I’ve written before about how the choices (or lack thereof) I made early in college affected how the rest of my college career turned out.
I think I was halfway through my sophomore year when I figured out I was going to pursue a degree in biology. If you’re majoring in any kind of science, you’ll need to complete a lot of science classes (imagine that!). Science classes normally come with a lab session that occurs in the afternoon, so a typical science class meets for three hours during the mornings of a week, and one afternoon a week there will be a three-hour lab session. If you stack up two or three science classes in a semester, you start running out of room in your schedule. You can see how it’s nice to spread out the required classes over eight semesters rather than five.
Since I found myself running a little behind schedule, I looked around for opportunities to catch up. It turns out my school offered something called a May term. After the regular spring semester ended and most students went home, a handful of classes were available. One-credit courses like tennis lasted a week. Two-credit classes went two weeks, and so on. One of the options was a four-credit science course I’d need for graduation. I ended up enrolling in it and stuck around after the spring semester wrapped and all my friends went home for the summer.
That class had to be one of the most stressful classes I took for my whole degree. The course material that was normally spread out over a semester got compressed into four weeks. Class all morning, take a lunch break, then meet in the lab for three or four hours every weekday afternoon. After that, grab some dinner, go back to your room and work on a paper or read the next chapter for the following day. I would read the material, but my mind just didn’t have the time to absorb it like it did during a normal semester. The lab sessions relied heavily on genetics experiments we did with fruit flies, which had a 14-day life cycle, and we needed to get at least two generations to have results for our final paper, so there wasn’t much room for error. While students in other classes spent their afternoons playing ultimate Frisbee or sunning themselves on the quad, I spent my time worrying about bug larvae.
The weeks went by, and as the shorter classes finished up, fewer and fewer students remained on campus. I was so stressed. I was the oldest person in the class; everyone else was an honors student who had spent the second half of their freshman year doing a semester abroad, and this class was mostly available to help them keep up with their pre-med degree plan. I wasn’t quite on the same level as them academically.
I eventually made it through the class, but it was a rough go for awhile. Here’s the important thing: I did this to myself. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it was my lack of planning ahead that led to this predicament. I had to live with the consequences of my own actions.
As Christians, we have the hope of the life to come, but first we have to make it through this one. People of all races, nationalities, and backgrounds are Christians, and Heaven will be full of incredible diversity as we’re united in Christ. All of us, however, will have had to live with the consequences of either our actions or someone else’s actions. That could mean broken relationships, poor credit history, self-inflicted medical issues, or a variety of other challenges.
As a Christian equipped with spiritual gifts, how are you empowered to either help yourself or help others through the unique challenges in life?