You were a rockstar in high school: graduated top of your class, won first place at state in your sport or activity and played piano several times for dinners hosted by the governor. Or maybe you were somewhere near the middle of your class or worked a couple of part-time jobs. For better or worse, none of that matters once you’re in college.

Everything you did up until the day you started college is wiped clean from your record (unless you committed a crime of some sort — those have a funny tendency to stick around with you like the acne scars from your pubescent years). As seemingly terrifying as all of that may be — acne scars included — college is one of the greatest moments of your life because you get to start over and reinvent yourself.

You can now define you.

The catch is that you are not going to find yourself as part of the larger, global community right away. It’s starts much smaller — at the University level — and even that’s slightly too big for this task of definition. On the path to defining who you are, you will have to define your education. You have to take control of it, make it what you want and do it quickly.

Some students will arrive here with some concrete goals: earn a degree in molecular and cellular biology, research with a professor, volunteer at a local hospital, graduate, attend medical school. Many will show up to campus without an inkling of an idea about what they want to do with their lives, whether it’s learning how to paint, becoming an advertising director or heading off to Cambodia to work with a NGO. Or maybe it’s just that they want to graduate.

Whatever the case is, you’re only in college for roughly four years, meaning you have much less time than you expect to put it all together.

When I came to the University, I was that MCB major that wanted to go to medical school. At least, that’s what I thought I wanted. My mom works in the medical field, and my dad has held various engineering and business positions over the last couple of decades. Countless times I heard off-the-cuff remarks about the “useless” majors, which was basically the term used for any and all courses of study that weren’t biology, chemistry, engineering or business.

Plus, every Forbes or Huffington Post list of the top 10 useless majors didn’t help matters. So I enrolled somewhat dispassionately as a student on a mission for an M.D., instead of something that might have interested me more. But really, who on Earth would want to study art history or theater or journalism?

You — that’s who.

After only two months of the course work (which was incredibly boring to me), I switched to a “useless” major: political science. To this day, I cannot tell you exactly why I chose it, but I did, and I am happy for doing so.

It has allowed me to take the myriad courses I wouldn’t have had time for had I stayed on the science track. There’s not a doubt in my mind that I would have made a lot more money had I stayed where I was originally, but had I stayed there, I am not sure if I would have found my love for following, reading, researching and reporting the news.

The classes I’ve taken have ranged from Greek and Norse mythology, to linguistics, to computer programming and Internet networking. No combination of these appears to be a blatantly obvious path to money or some all-American success story, but they have pushed me to consider the world differently.

And that’s probably the biggest cliche you will ever read about college.

But there’s a reason things like that become cliche, and I’ll stretch to say that because they are facts of life that have been distilled so many times, nothing but the truth is left.

Sure, college has become the gateway drug to a career, replacing the high school diploma of yesteryear, but that doesn’t mean that this is the only purpose.

Most of what I have said has focused on choosing your major because that will be one of the most daunting decisions you face in the beginning — and I’m not going to pretend it’s not hard. Even for those who are dead set on their major will find themselves reconsidering their decision more than a few times over the course of their time at the University.

Don’t let the decision get you down too much. Remember, you are defining who you are, and your college major. While it is the entire world in first few years of college (as it should be), it is not the only part of your time here. You still have more clubs and organizations to join and a chance to involve yourself in more than you could ever imagine.

So, I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice: If you are thinking about doing something or trying something and you are not currently doing it, you’re wasting time. Think hard, but act quicker.

Ryan is a senior in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ryanjweber.