Journey to Here - Part 5

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Out of the middle of nowhere in mid-January it hit me…. I didn’t belong at RPI and needed to leave. The thought of not being at RPI had never crossed my mind and it was like it just popped into my brain. I stewed for a couple of weeks and finally broke it to my parents at the kitchen table one weekend. I didn’t want to be at RPI anymore and needed to leave- oh yeah, and while I was transferring, I wanted to change my major too. While I had been planning on being an architect for as long as I could remember, I wanted to focus on space planning and the design aspect- not structural and exterior things. While researching a transfer I found that there was a degree for that! Because I hadn’t looked past RPI in the first place I didn’t realize I could specialize in something deeper than architecture.

I was expecting to be told to suck it up, deal with it, stick it out, etc. I was getting free tuition at a prestigious private school!

Instead they agreed.

Apparently it was clear to them that it wasn’t right for me. They could see I was different.

At this point it was early February. Transfer application deadlines were for February 15. My mission for the next week was to a) find schools to apply to and b) fill out those dang applications! Where did I apply to? Well.. pretty much the same places that I did in the first place – Wentworth had an interiors program and had offered me a pretty sweet scholarship the year before, so I went for it again, and I also applied to Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech kept popping up in my searches for accredited interior design programs, and they also had a Russian program where I could use my college credits earned in high school, as well as a landscape architecture program, which would have been my next option if I changed my major again. This school that I had never been to became my front runner.