Among Lasallians, the standard icebreaker is an exchange of degree programs and ID numbers. They are brief social shorthands to map out who you are on campus and where you’re going in life. My favorite zinger is telling people I shifted to Political Science, then daring them to guess where I started. No one gets it right: I came from the Medical Biology program.
In the College of Science, the Biology programs are treated with reverence. Biology is known to be notoriously demanding, designed as a fast-track pressure cooker for future doctors and researchers. It was never a program to enter half-heartedly—which I did anyway, predictably failing to excel.
Growing up, being a doctor was framed as the pinnacle of success and security—a narrative especially prevalent in middle- and working-class families, where healthcare and service are seen as the only respectable ladders out of precarity. Stepping onto DLSU’s campus exposed me to a far wider spectrum of ambition, but the indoctrination ran deep. I convinced myself that suffering through the hard sciences was simply the price of admission to a worthy life.
So I endured it. I watched my peers and I burn out, some transferring out or dropping. Others joke self-deprecatingly about wanting to quit, only to stay the course anyway. But for many that meant those jokes, there is a deep fear of wasting time that eclipses the misery of staying. And within that fear is the belief that leaving meant admitting we had wasted our time.
For me, the hesitation to actually do something was even more agonizing. As a working student, every unit carried a literal price tag—nearly P4,000 out of my own pocket and hard work. I was hesitant to abandon half a curriculum because it meant accepting that dozens of units, hundreds and thousands of pesos, and countless sleepless nights would become instantly obsolete on paper.
Yet, my true inclination kept leaking through the cracks. While drowning in medical transes and reviewers, I found myself envying the readings assigned to my peers from the College of Liberal Arts. I had read Machiavelli’s The Prince for leisure at sixteen; I desperately wanted to analyze power and political thought, but I was stuck creating a lab report for a Chemistry subject I could barely pass. I also noticed how my general education (GE) classes felt like oxygen. I looked forward to my GE classes more than my major classes that felt like submersion. Thus, when sitting in the University’s free counseling sessions, I frequently beat around the bush until I finally voiced the thought I had been too terrified to admit: I am in the wrong place.
Three years into the Biology program, I had come into a long-overdue reckoning. The potential loss of money and units ceased to outweigh my desire to actually be happy. I filed to shift, took a leave of absence to step away from the noise, cut my losses, and returned as a Political Science major.
While the transition wasn’t an escape from difficulty, I persevered through the choice of finally deciding which struggle was worth my energy. I went from dissecting organisms to dissecting systems, trade-offs, and power dynamics. While the academic workload didn’t get lighter, I could tell that my spirit did. I was finally engaging with questions that mattered to me, driven by critical thought rather than obligation.
Through this long detour, I learned a crucial lesson early on about the sunk cost fallacy.
Many students stay in programs they despise because they confuse holding on with perseverance. We treat unhappiness like an entry fee we’ve already paid, convincing ourselves that staying for the rest of the miserable show will get us our money’s worth. But staying in a bad situation doesn’t recover nor make up for anything. It just ensures you keep paying with your future.
Shifting was an act of clarity. I realized I owe my loyalty to my present well-being and future growth, not to a past decision made by a younger, less experienced version of myself.
College is merely the prelude. Life will be built on thousands of decisions, big and small, and the sunk cost fallacy will remain one of the most persistent, insidious monsters you will ever encounter. It will urge you to stay in the wrong career, the wrong relationships, and the wrong rooms simply because you’ve already invested time, money, and effort into them. Don’t listen to it. Cut your losses, honor what you learned from the detour, and have the courage to walk away.
You’ve already paid the cost—don’t let it sink you, too.