In the summer before freshman year, I made a scientific breakthrough.

Having spent weeks poring over a worn-out copy of the NYU Abu Dhabi Academic Bulletin and having filled out every academic planning resource I could unearth from the darkest, creepiest depths of the NYUAD Student Portal, I hit upon a formula for academic success.

This was a formula that would allow me to fulfil my lifelong academic dream of completing two majors, two concentrations and my cores. A formula that would let me earn credits beyond my wildest imagination.

But it all hinged on one tiny, reasonable assumption: that I would get three out of the eight courses I had listed on my course enrollment preference form.

I got two.

Having been brutally spurned by the Gods of course enrollment, I spent the next year doing things I would have never dreamt of doing. With my plan in tatters, I took courses outside of my intended majors. I took cores outside of my comfort zone. In the beginning, it was horrifying.

And then, it wasn’t.

In fact, it’s probably one of the best things that happened to me in freshman year. Here’s what I learned:

####College Is the Best Time to Get Yourself Some Mad Skillz: In the summer before freshman fall, my parents suggested that I take a coding course in college. As a prospective literature major, my reaction was, Bah! Humbug. Everybody knew that when the apocalypse came around and the Wi-Fi went out, the only thing left would be the written word. What would I do with <print (“Hello world!”)> when there was no world left to say hello to?

As a lover of the humanities, I also didn’t see how learning about algorithms and compilers could possibly help me as an artist. Instead, shouldn’t I use my college years to improve my literary knowledge as much as I possibly can?

“Words are my jam,” I informed my parents. “I’m hella good at words, fam.”

But my eloquence did not persuade them, and neither did my argumentative essay titled, Lit is Lit but Science has No Chill. They persisted, and in the spring, I decided to take a computer science core class.

It changed my life.

It was incredibly empowering to be able to create a website from scratch. I now know that if I ever need to develop a website for one of my literary pursuits, I’d be able to do it without having to rely on a gum-chewing, baseball cap-wearing web developer. Or at the very least, I’d understand that when the web developer said the word back-end they’d simply be doing their job and not making inappropriate anatomical references.

The truth is that a literature major needs to study programming because we don’t live in a Maze-Runner-like world, where everyone’s job description comprises a single task. Stories today are told digitally, and writers must adapt to survive. A physics major needs to take a course in world history because most scientific breakthroughs have occurred during periods of great historical turmoil. A computer science major must take an interest in literature to understand Maze Runner references.

College is a time to grow, and the best way to grow is to skill up.

####Never Trust Your High School Instincts: Your academic tastes in school should not be the yardstick by which you make decisions in college. In school, I disliked classes for all sorts of irrational reasons. For instance, the extent to which I disliked a class was directly proportional to how many flights of stairs I had to climb to get to the classroom.

So by the time I graduated high school, I wasn’t sure about my major, but I was convinced about what I didn’t want to study. I didn’t want to study math, because it’s always made me sad. I didn’t want to study economics, because it was rumored to involve math. I didn’t want to study chemistry, because my second grade science teacher was a meanie. I was convinced that this process of elimination would lead me to my major.

I was wrong.

In school, subjects are compartmentalized into boxes so as to not confuse 12-year-olds. But in college, the assumption is that you can handle a class that tackles a single subject via two or more disciplines: psychology and philosophy, math and anthropology, film and biology.

I was thrown into a state of disarray. I didn’t know which courses to take because in school, psychology class had been on the second floor and philosophy on the sixth. Math had been taught on the fourth floor. Biology class had been in a different building altogether.

Eventually, I learned to question everything high school had taught me about my academic preferences. As a humanities major, I used to believe that stepping into the science building would give me cooties, but when I finally took a science class, I found out that cooties spread through contact and not by air. It changed my life.

Saying that you’re not a science person is a terrible excuse to not take a science class, and saying that you’re not a writing person is a terrible excuse to not take a humanities class. At NYU Abu Dhabi, you’re a liberal arts person and you can take any class you want.

####Don’t Judge A Course By Its Name: So how do you actually pick your courses? Read the course description, you might reply. If it sounds interesting, take it.

Wrong answer. There’s a certain extent to which course descriptions help. You may think that a core called What Does An Infection Do? will be related to biology but it may actually be all about zombie movies. It all depends on the professor teaching the course.

So the first step is to look up the professor’s areas of interest, and then head to the bookstore and take a look at the course reading list. And if all else fails, take advantage of Add/ Drop week. In my first semester I had benevolent concerns like, if I drop this class the professor might feel bad, as well as comforting socialist rationales: I’ve made friends here so maybe it’s safe to just stick with this incredibly hard class because if we fail, at least we’ll all fail together.

Course enrollment is an individual endeavor. If you’re convinced you can’t do it, drop it.

####If You Love Your Academic Plan, Let it Go: Last year, if someone had told me that I should explore subjects like science and philosophy in my freshman year, I would’ve flashed two thumbs up, said “Sure, alrighty!” and then I would’ve turned my head and snorted, “Hippie”.

Today, I have embraced the spirit of the liberal arts.

Yes, it’s good to have a plan. Great, even. But there’s a fine line between a plan being a useful guide and a plan being the thing that cripples you. You know you’ve crossed the line when you find yourself saying, “I want to take this incredible course but I can’t because then I won’t be able to do this particular psychology course in my second semester of junior year, and then my life will start crumbling around me.”

I certainly don’t encourage setting your academic plan on fire, but cut yourself some slack this freshman year. Go wild and fill an elective or two with classes that you never imagined you would do. If you really love your four-year academic plan, let it go. Give it some space to live and breathe.

And if it really loves you, it will come back.