“That’s what Doc’s been saying,” Jerome said, even though he was nodding his head and looking at Alejandro as if he’d never heard any of this before.

“Glad to know you’ve been listening to me,” she mumbled.

“I listen,” Jerome said with a sheepish grin, “but it’s just hard not to feel like I’m wasting time and not doing enough, you know.”

Oh, Deja could relate to every part of that sentence. She felt her face scrunching with concentration.

“The thing to remember about college is that this isn’t your entire life, it’s just one phase of many,” Alejandro said. “You’re here to learn as much as you can and not just in the classroom. Sometimes the thing you need to learn is balance. You can take all the classes and double, even triple major if you want to, but when you’re burnt out at graduation and can’t even enjoy all the things you’ve accomplished, you’ll regret it.”

“So, what do I do?” Jerome asked.

“Give yourself the rest of the academic year. Don’t make any decisions until the summer. Until then, take classes in your prereqs with majors you might like without commitment. Then, when the year is over, and you’re back home and resting,” he said, his eyes flicking mischievously to Deja, “then you can decide what you want your majors and minors to be.”

Deja had said some version of this to Jerome before, and she held her breath, waiting to see if this time it would stick. She watched Jerome’s face scrunch again. They were almost at Founders Hall, and they really needed to get into the auditorium to get good seats, but if Alejandro echoing advice she’d been giving Jerome almost weekly was enough to make it stick, Deja would be late. Happily.

In front of Founders, Deja stepped onto the first step so she could be almost at eye level with Jerome and Alejandro.

“What do you think, Doc?” Jerome asked.

There was a part of Deja that just wanted to mother her students, especially her Black students who had no idea how to navigate the university. She wanted to wrap them in a blanket and fight all their battles, but she couldn’t do that. Most of them had mothers to do that, and most crucially, mothering wasn’t her area of expertise. Her job was to advise them and prepare them as best she could for the world off-campus, which meant she couldn’t make decisions for them. She could support them in making these decisions for themselves but no more, and sometimes, it was hard to keep that boundary.

“I think,” she said and then took a calm breath, “that Dr. Mendoza and I have a meeting right now, and you have to get to the Writing Lab.”