As a senior, you are always asked what are you planning on doing in college. Some students just rattle off a list of things like going to a junior college then transferring to a university of their choice. Some are going straight to a university, others just to a junior college, And some don’t go to college at all.

But what happens if you don’t know what you want to do in college? That is where advisers come in. There are advisers at every college and one of the reasons that they are there is to help you figure out what major is the right choice for you. There are many ways this can happen. One is that you can take a career cluster. A career cluster is a survey with many different sections. You circle the ones that apply to you and then you see which boxes have the highest number of circles in it. There is a chart that show which responses indicate possible strengths for  specific careers.  This has helped many students narrow down their thoughts.

Erin, an adviser at Lincoln Trail College, says, “It is perfectly normal for students to come to me and not know what they want to do. When this happens we sit down to discuss what they are interested in and then usually I have them fill out a career cluster. Then we just go from there.”

Usually, when a student doesn’t know what they want to do in college they become more stressed the closer it gets to the end of the school year. Sometimes it is because they are constantly being asked, “What are you going to study in college?” or “Where are you going to college?” When filling out applications sometimes they will just pick something that they have thought about going into in the past because they don’t want to be one of “those students” that says they are undecided.

But honestly being one of “those students” can sometimes help you find what you are truly passionate about without changing your major many times. The Division of Undergraduate Studies at Penn State did a study in 2013 that said nearly 75 percent of students change their major at least one time once they get into college.

If you happen to be a high school student that doesn’t know what they want to do quite yet, you are not alone. There are many high school and even college students around the country that are not certain about what they want to study. There are probably even students in this very high school that are completely clueless about what they want to do in the long term.  Don’t stress about it! Everything will turn out great in the long run.  You just have to trust the people around you to help you make the right choices for your college plans.

Don’t wait until the last minute to start thinking about college. Start keeping a list of the things that you have any interest in at all and then see where that takes you.