Why I changed my Major from Pre-law to Film

Back during my junior year in high school I started taking college courses at the Ohio State University, and I started figuring out what I wanted from life. I was ambitious and driven to get where I wanted to be, and soon I figured out that I wanted to be a lawyer.

My main reason for wanting to be a lawyer was that I wanted to help victimized women, and men, get the justice they deserve.

Past experience motivated me as I leapt over hurdle after hurdle to succeed at my classes. For the longest time, I was the youngest, and noticeably so, person in all my classes.

After a while, I wanted to better my chances of getting a job after law school more, and gain valuable experience in the legal field. This made me interested in joining the Army Reserve, and I did.

Around two years after joining the Army under the split-op program and about a year after graduating high school, my interest in the legal field started dwindling. It's not that I hated it, but I just couldn't force myself to love, or at least feel passionate, about what I was doing anymore.

If I'm being honest, I think part of the reason I started turning away from this goal of becoming a lawyer was because of the college classes I was taking. At the Ohio State University, the classes I was taking in political science and pre-law were unbiased and intriguing, but when I got to Miami University after high school, the classes bordered on biased and were lack-luster to say the least. It could have just been the professors I had, but it ended up making me lose a lot of interest in the field.

Another thing that made me realize that law was not what I wanted to do was the Army and my experience as a paralegal specialist. I felt like everyone I worked under or with had such high expectations of me all the time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I ended up feeling like I was constantly falling short. I also felt and still do feel like people don't realize how young I really am, and how young people are still learning and figuring out what they want to do in life. I also felt like whenever I had a change of heart about working in the legal field people were upset, and often made comments about how being a lawyer "pays good" and how doing something other than that wasn't going to get me as far in life.

By the time fall semester was almost over, I decided that I officially wanted to break it off with pre-law. It was making me miserable.

It left me with a question though: what do you want to do with your life?

Back in high school, I was a theater kid, a dancer, a musician, and an artist. I can't say I was amazing at any of those things, but I always had a good time sans the many hours standing on stage doing tedious things like blocking a scene or marking choreography. For a while, when I was in high school, I contemplated doing theater in college as a major, but then thought about how I wouldn't make money and I probably couldn't even get into a college for theater because I probably wasn't even that good.

As I was trying to figure out what I wanted from life, I thought back to all the countless hours I spent on my artistic passions. I've always loved writing, so maybe journalism or creative writing. I really like fashion and design, so maybe I could do fashion merchandising and designing. I've always loved music and arts, so maybe something music related. Ultimately, none of these felt right, but it still left me with that question.

After a while, an old friend of mine, who coincidentally goes to the same college as me, started a screenwriting club on my campus. At first, I was too busy to actually go, but I finally decided to make the time to try it out.

The club had already been working on a project for a while, but, ultimately, found a place for me to join in, and I'm super glad it worked out!

As it turns out, the University of Cincinnati has its own film program under the title of Digital Media Collaborative. It essentially acts as film school with classes in media production, screenwriting, directing, and finding your creative voice in film.

What is most intriguing to me is that most of the classes are hands-on and practical, rather than just watching a film and evaluating it like film studies.

After a short while, that felt like forever, I rolled the idea of doing Digital Media Collaborative (DMC) around in my mind, and finally decided to request a major transfer, but after two weeks of not hearing anything, I started to get nervous.

Everything was okay though, because, not long after, I finally got news that DMC would be my new major, and that I would also be getting a Director's certificate as my area of focus.

I'm super happy with the turn of events while also being a little nervous to start on a new goal and a new major. I think sometimes the best things in life are the unexpected ones.

Here are some helpful links if you want to learn more about digital media collaborative at the University of Cincinnati:

https://www.artsci.uc.edu/dmc.html

https://www.artsci.uc.edu/dmc/curriculum.html

https://www.coursicle.com/uc/courses/DMC/