When the Plan You Arrived With Stops Fitting

Committing to a major at eighteen, based on a fraction of the information you'll eventually have about yourself and the world, and then never changing your mind, isn't actually a realistic standard — it's just the one a lot of students hold themselves to anyway. Changing direction can feel like admitting you wasted time or failed at the first plan, when it's usually just evidence that the plan did its job: it taught you something true about what you don't want.

The sunk-cost feeling is real and worth naming directly — "I've already done two years of this" is a completely understandable reason to hesitate, and it's also not actually a reason to spend the next two years unhappy on top of it. The time already spent is spent either way. The only real choice left is what happens next.

If something you thought you wanted has stopped fitting, that's not a personal failure. That's what happens when you keep learning who you are after you made a decision with less information than you have now.