I think the biggest takeaway from this year has been that it's okay not to know what you want to do. Anecdotally, I encountered far fewer people freakily set on a chosen in freshman year of college than I did in high school -- abjuring old major beliefs might as well have been an orientation event.

I arrived in Washington Square in August self-identifying as a prospective journalism and economics major. Two semesters later, I'm much less sure. I realized that economics doesn't interest me as much as I first thought, and I'm only interested in very specific subsections of journalism: media criticism, or how current technologies fit with civil liberties and the law, rather than straightforward reportage.

But that seems to have been the point of freshman year. I fulfilled a ton of requirements. My favorite classes were probably from the fall -- an introduction to Chinese history (1830-1949) and a New York literature seminar that was less of a structured class and more a group of students meeting with an adjunct professor in Silver 507 every Thursday afternoon. He was good-natured but firm in his advice that majoring in journalism at an undergraduate level was a silly idea, and I think I came round to his advice. Right now, I'm trying to change schools at NYU to major in media, cultures, and communications (MCC). I'm still trying to distill that to digital media with a side of technology-interacting-with-the-law, but it's a work in progress. If I follow this track, I'll also have room for three electives, slots where I can take almost any class. They'll be my law classes, or something random like art history.

One thing I realized this year is that nobody tells you just how much your college career is filled with uncertainty. Seriously -- if I was to give one piece of advice to incoming freshmen, I'd tell them that not knowing is okay. If someone had told me that, I'd have been much less stressed. One of my coping mechanisms became looking at people I admired and looking at the track they took. Alec, one of the guys I'm working with at the Student Net Alliance, majored in MCC, and that's how I learned about the program. (Side note -- congrats on graduating, Alec!) Glenn Greenwald started out as a litigator, and he's talked about how that experience was useful to him in the early days of the Snowden story. I'm not saying that Greenwald's perfect, or going from lawyer to columnist is the best -or only- path in life, even if it's where I think my interests lie. Still, I think it's worth looking at people in the sphere you're interested in and seeing how they got there. NYU doesn't have a pre-law track and going to graduate school seems diametrically opposed to all the dropping-out-of-college jokes I make, but that's not to say that I can't take electives in the area if it continues to hold my interests. 

I found myself getting much more involved in campus activities this semester, as I found my feet in New York and shifted my focus away from academics full time. I got involved with Tech@NYU and the Student Net Alliance. Being more comfortable in New York City definitely helped, and I had great friends outside NYU who got me out of the Village now and then. I also volunteered with NYU's LGBTQ center, and next semester I'll be working on their project to educate the campus population on issues facing queer individuals.

I said at the beginning of the semester that I was looking forward to trying a politics class because it didn't represent that big a time commitment -- if I ended up not liking international politics, a quarter of a semester isn't much time "wasted". As it turned out, I found that studying I.P. was fascinating, but I don't think I want to spend more time studying it. I loved the readings and the fact that everything followed common sense (it stood to reason that a second-strike nuclear defense system can only be effective if it's not secret, for example), but I didn't find it particularly compelling as a subject. Whether that's true of all politics classes or just the branch of game-theoretical international politics I took this semester remains to be seen. 

As I write this, I'm in San Francisco, where my brothers live. I'll be based here for the next two months tinkering on projects and generally enjoying a change in scene. I fell hopelessly in love with New York City this year, but I don't agree with those classmates who can't see themselves living anywhere else ever again. It's a great city with a ton of great opportunities, but other places, both in the US and abroad, have a lot going for them too. In January, I started work on another piece of extended fiction that's currently parked on my hard-drive. At the moment, I don't have plans to return to it right now. 99% of my writing right now is copy for various activism causes, and it's hard for me to disconnect from that and go back to fiction (especially when the genre is also cyber-security). 

As always, I'll share big news here.