Each spring, the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Oakland University recognizes a graduating student for the Meritorious Achievement Award. 

According to the university, the award honors “extraordinary academic achievement beyond that required for good grades … the following criteria will be used to evaluate the nominations: originality, extent of effort, scholarly significance, artistic merit/significance.”

I’m still a little surprised I received it

I didn’t have a flawless résumé or a carefully mapped out plan. I switched majors, took on jobs that pulled me in completely different directions and said yes to opportunities that didn’t make sense on paper but sounded cool at the time.

I don’t think I received this award for doing everything right. If anything, I think I earned it by having a really good time along the way.

In my freshman year, I started as an international relations student in the political science department. I even worked in the city hall for two years, which means I have great stories – and not much fazes me anymore.

I saw how policy actually happens: looming deadlines, overlapping calendars, different personalities and an overwhelming number of Excel spreadsheets. Through that experience, I learned that policy isn’t an abstract idea in a textbook – it directly affects people’s daily lives.

But by the end of my sophomore year, I pivoted.

I added public relations and strategic communications as a second major after realizing I didn’t want to stay inside these systems – I wanted to explain them. Around the same time, I also joined The Oakland Post and started writing for the politics section. Journalism made me more accountable, more precise and more aware that if I got something wrong, people would notice. It taught me how to ask better questions and how to listen closely.

And then, as any confused college student would do, I dropped everything and went to Prague.

I spent the summer learning Czech, a language I had never spoken before arriving. There was no master plan here. It sounded fun at the time, and that was apparently enough justification for me. Some days, I felt impressive ordering coffee or food in full sentences. Most days, I stood in grocery stores translating labels word by word. Somewhere between catching sunsets on the Charles Bridge and missing metro stops, it turned out to be one of the most formative experiences I didn’t know I needed.

My third major, French language and literature, was not part of any grand strategy. In all honesty, I chose it because I thought it was sexy. I still do.

It’s the major I default to when a guy at the bar asks what I study because it sounds elusive. I also tutored French at the Academic Success Center on campus, where helping freshmen with pronunciation quickly became the most wholesome part of my week. 

At the same time, it was easily my most challenging major. I got my butt kicked in a 4000-level 19th-century French literature class. If you think “Les Misérables” is hard to get through in English, try reading it in French, slowly, with a dictionary open, fighting back tears of frustration as you reread the same paragraph five times. I still get tripped up on verb conjugations, but somewhere along the way, French stopped being an aesthetic choice and became the hardest thing I’ve done – and also the major I’m the most proud of.

Before my senior year, I went to Paris to study architecture, which made absolutely no sense on paper because I had never studied architecture before.

Within a few weeks, I had ink stains on my hands, a sketchbook in my bag and a routine of sprinting from the metro because I was always late to class. I spent my days gawking at cathedrals, people watching from metal café chairs and trying to understand how history and culture could be built into a physical space. 

One of my favorite jobs was working for the Southeast Michigan World Affairs Council, doing communications work and event planning. Occasionally, this also meant I got to sit in on lunches with guest speakers – including ambassadors. 

I  remember sitting with the former ambassador to Venezuela, trying to act normal, while poking at my plate of chicken piccata. I could not believe this was my Tuesday afternoon. 

In January, I started a job at Local 4, the news station in downtown Detroit.

Working at WDIV taught me the chaos of a newsroom in real time. I spent hours listening to police scanners. At any moment, something could happen, and when it did, the newsroom shifted. 

It taught me how fast news actually breaks, and how fast you have to move when it does. There were a few hallway sprints. There was a lot of controlled panic. But more importantly, there was this strange feeling about hearing about a breaking story from a police scanner before the public would know it minutes later.

During my first week at WDIV, I got a call from the Japanese Embassy offering me a spot on a two-week diplomatic trip.

So, on my first day at work, I had to awkwardly tell my boss – who had just hired me – that I would actually be leaving for two weeks and needed to adjust my contract. It was not ideal timing, but it was also an opportunity I couldn’t say no to.

Japan was incredible. It’s hard to summarize the experience without sounding overly dramatic and soppy, but it changed how I see a lot of the world. I sang karaoke, ate the best food and visited shrines.

I also cried on my flight back home, which I guess says enough about my experience there.

I did a lot of odd jobs in college. I worked in retail to pay for Paris – folding jeans and tagging clothes. I worked in newsrooms, nonprofits, medical institutions and everything in between. I researched for the U.S. Department of State for a semester, which still feels like it shouldn’t be on my résumé. I was even Miss New Hampshire for a brief week in Washington, D.C., where I shook hands with senators and a Supreme Court Justice. It wasn’t all glamorous, but it was meaningful.

If there’s anything that made me a strong candidate for this award, I don’t think it was having the clearest, most impressive path. I wasn’t efficient or linear. Three majors, four countries and multiple jobs later, I changed my mind often, said yes more than I said no and trusted things would eventually fall in place.

My favorite moments were not spent in the classroom (although I did learn a lot there, too). They were spent seeing the Charles Bridge at sunset, eating a late-night crêpe on a Paris sidewalk with friends, running through newsroom hallways on deadline and getting lost in Tokyo while jet-lagged.

This award feels less like a big finish line and more like a nod to the long way around. OU wasn’t a straight path, but it was a meaningful one – and more importantly, a fun one.

I’m deeply thankful for my professors and faculty advisors who took my work seriously even while I was still figuring things out. They scribbled thoughtful notes in the margins of my essays, stayed after class to talk through ideas and supported me throughout it all. Their mentorship and faith in my skills changed everything for me.

So here’s my unofficial advice, which I’m fairly confident OU would not endorse: Do the fun thing. Take the class that sounds cool, study the language you think is sexy and say yes more often than you think you should.