Susan Choi

So I loved writing, but by the time I was a teenager and a college student, I think I almost had like a sort of a dismissive attitude toward it.

Like, oh, that's just a hobby.

Or, oh, that's, I don't know.

I don't think I consciously dismissed it, but I did have this dismissive attitude.

And it wasn't until I graduated from college with like no skills at all.

But I started writing again kind of seriously and thought like, oh, is this a thing people could actually do full time?

And I went back to it.

What had you studied at college?

Oh, God.

I mean, I was really, I barely graduated because I kept changing my course of study.

I majored in everything.

And in the end, yeah, really, no, it's really true.

And I try to tell this story a lot to my own students because I think there is this sense of like, you should have it all figured out.

And I'm like, I'm a really good example of someone who did not have it all figured out and still maybe does not have quite a lot figured out.

But in college, I think I was an American Studies major.

an art major, but I couldn't draw, so that didn't last.

I considered being a theater studies major.

I might have considered being a French major, but I was really bad at French.

I ruled out being an English major because there's too much reading.

And I ended up something called a literature major, which is such a questionable program of study because it was only literary theory and not actual literature that I think that they have phased it out as kind of an embarrassment to the university.