Student Blog: Switching Majors, Transferring, and Growing Up! Oh My!
Sonia talks about her journey deciding to transfer and switch majors!
From 2025-2026, I was a BFA Musical Theatre major at a college. My whole life that is what I thought I wanted. I started performing at 11-years-old and said I was going to do it for the rest of my life. I wasn’t necessarily wrong, I am just pivoting slightly. This year I am transferring to a conservatory and switching my major to a BFA in Stage and Screen Acting.
I learned a lot about myself this year. I learned that I am more independent than I thought, I can make friends anywhere I go, even in tough times I can figure things out, and I learned that maybe a BFA in Musical Theatre wasn’t what I wanted after all.
It’s a really scary thing to figure out that the major you are in isn’t for you… especially when it’s what you thought you wanted for the majority of your life … like, nightmare level stuff.
At the beginning of this year, I wasn’t in a show and during that time I spent a lot of time thinking. It used to scare me to have time to think (especially as someone with obsessive compulsive disorder… thinking isn’t always my friend!), but this was good for me. In fact, it was necessary. If you never allow yourself to think, you never allow yourself to challenge your thoughts or to change. And that is exactly what this time allowed. It allowed me to re-evaluate my goals and ambitions and decide if what I was doing was going to bring me where I wanted to go and I figured out - no, it wasn’t. Not in the way I had originally hoped.
Lots of tears were shed in the making of this decision. It sounds so silly, but it really felt like I was letting my younger self down.
I do still plan on doing musical theatre - trust me, this is not goodbye. I had just realized though, that an acting major at a new school was the right decision for me at this point in my life.
I wanted to share this to let you know that it’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to realize what you thought you wanted isn’t what you actually wanted after all. It’s okay to shift, it’s okay to expand, it’s okay to grow up.
I think where a lot of my anxiety was coming from was the sheer idea that I was growing up. Growing up means my mind will change one hundred times over and I have to be okay with that. What had fit my lifestyle at 11-years-old does not necessarily fit my 19-year-old lifestyle and that’s OKAY! It’s to be expected. You are supposed to evolve and change and figure out new parts of yourself. That’s what makes growing up so exciting. It’s a real-life “choose-your-own-adventure” book, and the fact is - sometimes you make a choice and realize it isn’t the right one for you - so you go back a couple of pages and try a new chapter. That’s the beauty of being human - you are allowed to do that.
So, yes, I am switching my major and transferring. Yes, my dreams have altered slightly. And YES, I am scared out of my mind. BUT, we learn and adapt and I am so ecstatic to start my new chapter!
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